


Some Other World

by StellaDraco



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Awkward Boners, Awkward Conversations, Awkward Sexual Situations, Car Accidents, Car Sex, Christmas, Creepy, Distrust, Dogs, Dubious Consent, Dysfunctional Family, Earning Back Trust, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Infidelity, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Enemies to Friends, Family Drama, Fish out of Water, Fluff and Humor, Frottage, Gallows Humor, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, Half-Siblings, Halloween, Holidays, Home Invasion, Honest Hearts, Hospitals, Humor, Hypothermia, Infidelity, Latin flirting, Legion - Freeform, Light BDSM, Loss of Trust, Love Triangles, M/M, Masochism, Minor Character Death, Non-Consensual Groping, Non-Sexual Slavery, PTSD, Phobias, Psychic Abilities, Psychological Trauma, Psychology, Random Fallout 3 characters, Sadism, Sailing, San Francisco, Serious Injuries, Sex in a Car, Shower Sex, Siblings, Slavery, Thanksgiving, Travel, Trouble, Trust, Trust Issues, and there's a bear., awkward family stuff, doctor fetish, gets oddly domestic, lots of injuries, lots of painkillers, lying, pop culture references, probably missed something, psychers, secret rooms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-25 10:02:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 54
Words: 322,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2617775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellaDraco/pseuds/StellaDraco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by A Neon Sign With Just One Letter Showing.</p>
<p>What would Fallout New Vegas become in a modern setting?  What would the Legion be?  Well, I got to wondering and that's pretty much where this came from.<br/>Jack, one very unlucky Scotsman, lands himself in intense relationships with two very different men: Arcade Gannon and Vulpes Inculta.  More than a little immoral himself, Jack finds himself torn between the two, almost an ally of the Legion unbeknownst to Arcade, while Vulpes has free access to Jack's house and all the secrets it holds.  But Jack has yet to fully ally with the Legion, and until he does, he has some very dangerous enemies.</p>
<p>Art relating to this story:<br/>Jack: http://orig10.deviantart.net/7e1d/f/2016/230/4/e/jackvalentine1_by_stelladraco-daeg239.jpg</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Walking Contradiction

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Neon Sign With Just One Letter Showing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1947456) by [Trystero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trystero/pseuds/Trystero). 



The plane had dropped so close to the waves that I had feared a water landing before the runway rushed in and caught the wheels of the 747.  It was barely dawn in San Francisco which meant that it would be two in the morning back home.  I rebuked myself at the thought.  This was home now.  The first gut-wrenching drop of the descent had woken me and I’d received a spectacular view of the fog-shrouded state as the first rays of sunlight flowed to meet the sea.  The Pacific.  I could not remember the last time I had seen the Pacific and I knew I would inevitably think of it as the Atlantic for a time, the ocean my Scottish home had overlooked.  No sense dwelling on the past.  

Whatever the time difference, I wasn’t tired.  I had been flying since I’d been an infant and developed the useful habit of sleeping through most flights.  It had the nasty side-effect of leaving me dehydrated and starving, but I skipped jet-lag and usually had no trouble powering through that grueling first day in the new time zone.  I insisted that this would be no different, that my life in this new and unfamiliar country would be a dawn as brilliant and blissful as the rising sun over those golden hills.  In some ways, I was more right than I could ever guess, and in others, more wrong than I would ever know.  

I grabbed my luggage and an assortment of bottled water and sandwiches for the cab.  For breakfast, I corrected myself.  PB&J and water, the breakfast of champions.  It was a big difference from sausage, mushrooms, and tea.  I could barely understand the cab driver and apparently, my Scottish accent vexed him just as much.  A fifteen minute struggle conveyed my destination and we spent the ride in silence after that.  Fog filled the streets, but not the fog I was used to.  It hung above the ground, shrouding buildings but leaving the roads clear, unlike the blinding mist that I’d grown up with, which pooled between the mountains and left the sky a pristine blue, when it wasn’t cloudy.  I would miss my home, but this was the land of opportunity, or so I had heard, and I no longer had family or future in the highlands.  The laws there were a problem, for someone in my line of work, but it was legal enough in America.  The streets would be another tough change, I noted, as the cab went nearly vertical and stopped at a red light near the top of a scarily massive hill.  I held my breath until we finally moved.  It wasn’t as if I would be driving, I consoled myself, and it wouldn’t bother me nearly as much on foot.  On foot, one couldn’t roll back down at high speed, possibly careening into the bay.  

I had read up on the area and learned what I could about my new address, the sight-unseen house I’d bought on Filbert street.  It looked nice.  It had a garden, apparently, not that I’d ever gardened.  Apparently, it was also inaccessible by car, or so the cabbie told me in his barely understandable English as he pulled over and let me out on the curb with my luggage, below an intimidatingly steep and narrow road towards a hill topped by trees and a tall, white tower.  Even in the light of the newly risen sun, that tower shown like a beacon.  Well, I could surely find my house from anywhere in town, at least.  

I looked around as I gathered my luggage and arranged it on my body.  My black backpack was worn to hell and so overstuffed that it had barely fit under the seat.  It must have weighed over thirty pounds and I had once used it as a weapon, not that I could right now once I had it held in place by the straining leather strap of my black canvas bag, which probably weighed about the same.  It held all the paintings I had cared to bring with me and the awkward square of art and wood felt heavier from the way I could never carry it comfortably, especially uphill.  The black strap ground into my neck, quickly wearing a cut along my spine.  Even without the brilliantly rainbow wheeled suitcase behind me I felt like a pack mule.  I carried the paper bag of my lunch and the remains of my breakfast in the hand that held the bowing plastic and metal handle of the suitcase.  The suitcase itself could easily have held two of me.  As it was, stuffed full of everything else in this world that I had found worth keeping, it probably weighed more than I did.  A series of black straps constricted the over-stuffed technicolor floral print.  I had energy, and I was strong enough to manage, despite everything I had had to bring, but even so I found the steep hill and the little too-low steps cut into the sidewalk alarming.  Putting off the ascent, I looked around.  

Never a city boy, I had failed to develop any ability to judge the safety of a neighborhood.  The dirty streets, graffiti, and abundance of homeless people sleeping on newspapers in the almost cold streets did nothing to hasten my journey onwards.  There were bars.  A pawn shop.  My eyes paused on a sign that proclaimed, “Atomic Wrangler: Drinks and Adult Entertainment.”  Sounded promising, although whether adult entertainment meant “porn” or “hookers” I wasn’t sure.  Both might be good.  I could probably write that off as research, I mused.  

A couple kids ran past, one chasing the other with a toy gun.  They broke me from my thoughts and I turned back to the hill in time to startle a big German Shepard that had been sniffing my canvas bag behind me.  He looked like a stray and his back legs were both missing.  Somebody had made him a little cart so he could move around, hopefully not the same somebody who had carved what looked like a tiny bull onto the animal’s flank.  I started to crouch, hoping to calm the dog down, but the movement scared him, and he fled down an alley, cart clattering all the way over the uneven pavement.  I guess the dog woke the homeless old man beside me, because he sat up.  

“You’ve seen them too, haven’t you?  I can see it in your eyes.  I knew I wasn’t the only one.”  I stared at him blankly.  I am probably the last person likely to react well in social situations, but words came to my mind, and, like the idiot I am, I said them.  

“Of course I’ve seen them, they come up from the fog at night and eat the bairns.”

Now he stared.  “Oh, you’re crazy.”

I laughed.  “Sorry, just kidding.  Who have you seen?  What’s your name, anyway?”

“They call me No-Bark, cause they know I ain’t just barking here, what I say’s got bite, cause it’s the truth.  The bull men, that’s who.  I seen them infecting more and more folk around these parts, they suck their brains out and then turn ‘em into one of them.  They’s working with the extraterrestrials, I know it.  Want to eat our hair to grow their horns.  The tower watches the city, but it don’t see what the bull men do.  Something rotten’s happening in this town, but don’t you tell no one that it was old No-Bark what told you so!”  He got up and started rummaging in a nearby trashcan.  

“Um...Okay, thanks for the...information.”

“You’ve been warned, youngin’.”  

Well, he seemed harmless.  I looked up at the grueling climb the way a cow looks at an oncoming train.  I’d best get this over with.  

I’m used to walking long distances and I’m stronger than I feel I look, having always been the scrawny one of my family, but after a while, I’m struggling to breathe and my calves are burning with every step.  The canvas bag keeps slapping my legs as I walk and nearly throwing me off balance, but I’m more worried about damaging the paintings than hurting myself.  I’m fairly durable.  Besides, coming out here like this with no real plan and no previous experience living independently, I’d had half a mind to take the Bridge to Daly City, as it were.*  

To distract from my pain, I focus on the city around me as I climb up into the lush garden that covers the top of the hill and, I suppose, a fair portion of the other side.  Having traveled, I couldn’t say that I had never seen anything like it, but I had surely never lived near anything so verdant.  It was October, so few plants were in bloom, but those that were opened as stunning floral gems perfuming the early-morning air with a hundred scents I had never smelled except in botanical gardens.  All around, I could hear the city waking and with it, I started to notice glittering jewel-like birds among the flowers.  Hummingbirds.  I froze on the steps.  I had never actually seen them before.  I felt like I had flown out of frigid Scotland and into some kind of Eden.  If wasn’t even unbearably hot here.  

A man I hadn’t noticed stood from a bench higher up the stairs and called down to me, “Ah, you must be Jack Maclean, the scotsman who just bought Ulysses’ previous residence.”  I tore my gaze from the colorful birds.  The man looked like he had stepped out of a black-and-white movie.  He was fairly good-looking, with a pristine suit, and hair so perfectly styled that I felt like he kept a team around to ensure that it never fell out of place.  They had plenty of places to hide in all the foliage.  

“Aye.  Um...Are you one of my new neighbors?”  He seemed a bit snobby and a bit too social.  I liked neighbors who left me alone and didn’t put on airs.  Maybe this wasn’t Eden after all.  

“No.  Robert House, mayor of this city and C.E.O. of House Realty.”  Oh.  So not just a neighbor, or maybe a neighbor as well.  I glanced around as he shook my hand, making me climb the last few steps to him to do so.  He gave me the unsettling impression that he would insist on the handshake regardless of what I did, and the sense the gesture gave me was less a message of peace and good-will than a warning to toe the line and maintain a good reputation for the sake of the neighborhood.  There was no one else around at all, wasn’t it a little...unsafe for the mayor to just hang out alone up here?  House seemed utterly confident, even though I was a little taller than him, younger, and probably stronger.  I mean, I wasn’t going to attack him, but I didn’t think he’d stand a chance if I had wanted to.  And then I remembered that this was America.  Yup, he was probably carrying a gun...somewhere.  I didn’t want to look too closely for concealed weapons.  This was not the kind of man I wanted to ask if he had a gun in his pants.  Not that I was averse to asking other men that question, in the better connotation.  I could actually use that line now.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *-Taking the bridge to Daly City, as he puts it, means to kill himself. Daly City is known for its cemeteries and the Golden Gate Bridge is a major suicide hot spot.  
> Yes, that got dark really quickly, but I swear I am trying to keep this story much lighter than the other one. ^w^' Also, sorry the first chapter hasn't actually gotten to Arcade or Vulpes yet, they're coming in soon, hopefully next chapter.  
> If you follow both this and I Left My Heart In Navarro, the latter is on hiatus until I figure out how to bridge the gap between where it is now and actually getting to Vulpes. I have a third work started, however, and may post that soon, but I'll be switching between them depending on my mood and such, so one or the other may not get upgraded for a while. Hopefully I can finish Some Other World before jumping around too much.  
> Also, the title is from a Green Day song of the same name. I'll be using various song titles as chapter titles, or possibly lyrics or modified titles. Most of them will be modern and some songs may be obscure. I don't have much of a sense of what people will know as far as songs go, so sorry if I pick something nobody's heard of...


	2. Everything Louder than Everything Else

House seemed to have expected me to say something, but he didn’t prompt me.  

“You _are_ John Lachlan Maclean, yes?”

“The fifth,” I corrected.  My family is unimaginative with male names.  

“Yes.  I had expected you to be older.”  He sounded disappointed.  A series of unfortunate circumstances had left me unable to do laundry or actually shower for over a month, so I picked up on the unspoken addition of, “and cleaner.”  Between the use of deodorant and attempts to keep clean without access to a shower, I had managed to stay somewhere at the high end of homeless hygiene, a far cry from anything this man wanted in his neighborhood, but I planned to remedy that as soon as I actually had a house.  He gestured for me to follow and started leading me down a steeper set of even more lushly adorned stairs.  “If I might ask, how old are you exactly?”

“Twenty-one.”  He turned back to eye me skeptically.  “Barely,” I admitted, “My birthday was last week.”  He said nothing, leading me down a few steps, although the answer seemed to have satisfied him.  I don’t drink either way, so it’s not like I have any reason to lie about being of age.  Of age for America.  I’d tried all kinds of booze when I had turned eighteen, which was how I’d come to learn that alcohol of any kind made me violently ill at the first sip.  Some kind of food sensitivity, apparently.  

He stopped at a neat brick walkway to a house I recognized from the pictures I’d seen online.  The garden had seen better days.  There were little american flags scattered among the newly-grown weeds, and not modern flags either.  The pattern was different.  I hadn’t really studied American history, but I guessed revolutionary war era flags.  My own portion of the garden along the stairs was small, not that I minded as it was less to tend to.  A wrought iron and brick fence separated it from the path down the long hill and beyond that wall grew a large bush covered in white flowers.  The bush had fared the best by far of the plants in my new garden and it filled the air almost suffocatingly with a heavenly sweet scent.  Jasmine.  I recognized it from the taste of my favorite tea.  The dwelling itself was in excellent repair and I was more than eager to set my stuff down inside and bathe.  After I took my leave (finally) of Mr. House.  

He watched me survey the building as if my gaze drained his bank accounts.  “Mister Maclean, tell me again, was there someone who will be ensuring that you pay the mortgage?  A parent, perhaps?”  

I barely kept my voice level as I replied.  “I assure you, sir, I am quite capable of paying for this house myself, although I may not look it.”  I felt as though he had unknowingly jabbed an open wound.  He still didn’t warm to me, but he stopped asking.  That was a start.  I filled out the paperwork in silence, resting my suitcase against my new wall, but refusing to set down the rest of my encumbrance.  Still watching me like a thief, House grudgingly handed over the keys.  “Have a good day, neighbor.”  He nodded, feigning good-will in a way that I had become very used to in recent years, and then stalked off.  I grabbed my suitcase, not bothering to fix it as it rolled over, and dragging it upside-down into my tiny yard and then my house.  

The house had come furnished, it sounded like this Ulysses guy had just up and left for no apparent reason.  He was probably dead, I thought grimly, maybe he used the bridge as I had half intended to.  I rolled the suitcase back over and left it beside the door.  The paintings were the only things I really wanted to unpack and I did so, hammering in nails and positioning them until the canvas bag was finally empty and I could chuck it in the closet.  I took care of a few more things, mainly personal hygeine and ate my lunch, stowing the last sandwich in the fridge and tucking a bottle of water into my pocket with my wallet.  I’d already converted all my money to dollars and switched to an American bank, which had been a hassle, but now that I was here, I didn’t need to convert my currency.  

For barely ten minutes, I tried to write, but it wasn’t happening.  I was wired; there was a whole new country, a new home, all around me and it was still before noon.  I wasn’t staying on the couch today, I was going to explore.  I left my backpack on the sofa beside me and my laptop on the table, closed and plugged in.  It felt weird to lock the door as I headed out.  I didn’t normally bother.  My dorm had locked automatically and my house, on fenced-in grounds, on a remote island, in the middle of nowhere, had never been a target of thieves.  I think our assortment of wolfhounds, fox hounds, and terriers had assured that.  I tucked the keys in my other pocket with my raspberry lip balm.  It was necessity, however effeminate it might be.  I tried not to use it in public unless my lips really got bad.  My roommates, for the short time that I had had roommates, had laughed at the way I was both defensively masculine and flamboyantly gay.  Loose black leather jacket, horribly battered t-shirt with a picture that had long ago peeled beyond recognition and tight, awkwardly cut dark jeans with unnecessarily large hiking boots gave me the look of someone who was overcompensating, they claimed.  And then there were my elaborate platinum and sapphire earrings and necklaces- which were currently visibly dirty.  And long, silky hair that I tied back.  I didn’t do anything to it at all, just like I didn’t mess with my face, but more than one person has told me that they thought I used hair products and those things women use to make their eyelashes longer.  Even when I was homeless.  Yeah, I had issues I tried not to think about too much.  

This side of the hill looked okay, but I was curious about that “Atomic Wrangler” place on the other side, so I trekked back up.  Two old women were chatting in the garden where I had first run into House.  The first stood among a sea of dogs, all hers, it seemed, and all out for a walk.  She seemed fairly nice, from her tone and expression.  The woman across from her faced mostly away from me and wore a wide-brimmed hat that hid her face.  I still wasn’t much for jumping into conversations and making friends, so I kept walking, planning to pass them by, but they intercepted me.  

Or rather the dogs did.  Something about the leg of my jeans fascinated the animals and they pranced towards me, tails wagging.  Thinking back, I remembered an incident of spilled gravy on these jeans a few weeks back.  The insanity my life had become over a month ago had kept me without a change of pants of late.  The largest dog leapt at me, resting his paws on my chest and plunging his nose and tongue into my face.  I liked dogs.  Dogs liked me.  That did not mean I wanted to be licked on the lips by a dog I’d never seen before.  I spluttered and froze, cornered by the pack against one side of the stairs, my back pressed against the garden’s iron fence.  

“Rey!  Down, Rey!  Leave him alone!”  Rey dropped back to all fours as the other dogs set about licking my jeans.  “Sorry.  They’re a bit pushy.”  

I smiled.  I hadn’t realized how much I’d been missing my dogs.  Now that they were not in my face, I could realize how cute the furry faces were as they all investigated my pants.  These were some kind of herding breed, hardly anything like the hounds and terriers I was used to, but dogs all the same.  I patted a spotted head and smiled at the women.  “It’s okay, I like dogs.”  Rey had vanished among the canine sea around my legs and I couldn’t pick him out.  There must have been at least six sniffing, licking, wagging animals surrounding me; even if I’d wanted to leave, I couldn’t escape easily.  The dogs had effectively trapped me in conversation.  

The other woman took the opportunity to end a debate.  “It’s _ceramic_.  Metal would get too hot at those temperatures.”  Before the first woman could rebuke her, she waded through the dogs and shook my hand.  “Daisy Whitman, I live just down the road,” she nodded down the hill and then at the other old woman, who was also wading through dog to me.  “This is Gibson.”  

Gibson shook my hand as well.  “How’d ya’ do.”

It wasn’t a question I was often asked, and she said it like a greeting, so I took it to be one.  “Hello.  I’m Jack Maclean.  Your dogs are very friendly.”  As I spoke, one of the dogs inevitably shoved its nose into my crotch, nearly making me fall backwards over the fence.  Gibson tugged them back.  

“Audaz!  Mind your manners!”  She looked up at me, “Sorry.  He’s just so shameless, sometimes...”  Audaz barked and wagged his tail.  

I bit back the remark that I wished I had a man like that dog.  “My dogs do the same thing all the time.  Did.  I guess most dogs just do that.”

Picking up on how I had changed that sentence to past tense, Gibson gave me a sad look.  “Sorry.  They’re in a better place now, dear.”  I didn’t bother to correct her and just nodded, glancing around to try and think of something to say to either change the topic or escape the conversation altogether.  She saved me the trouble.  “Well, we’d best get moving if we’re going to reach the park before lunch.  Stop by my scrap shop or the garage connected to it, if you have time while you’re here.  The pups and I are there most days.” She smiled cheerily and started down the stairs behind me.  

“I’m not actually on vacation,” I corrected as she led the dogs away, “just new in town.”  I waved and started towards the Wrangler before she could suck me back into the chat.  I had expected Daisy to follow Miss Gibson, but she was apparently headed the same way I was.  She fell into step beside me on the stairs and I didn’t feel like trying to outpace her.  

“New in town and seeing the sights?”

I tilted my head at her quizzically.  

“The Filbert street stairs, a lot of tourists pass through here.  There’s also Levi’s Plaza on that side, and the piers.”  She gestured back the way Gibson had gone.  

“Oh.  No, I just live around here and wanted to head this way and look around.  I saw some interesting things over here.”  I didn’t want to specifically tell this old woman that I hoped to check out a bar which also provided ambiguously advertised “adult entertainment.”  If she was still beside me when I reached it, I would probably keep walking and find something a bit more socially acceptable to stop at before doubling back.  Like maybe a tattoo parlor.  I’d found that few things lowered one’s reputation quite as quickly as being associated with the porn industry, which was really what I suspected “adult entertainment” would mean.  Not that I cared too much about my reputation to begin with, but I didn’t want this nice woman to hate me without good reason.  

“Let me guess, The Red Beret caught your eye?  Hate to burst your bubble, but the drag show isn’t until eight and they don’t do it on Sundays.  The bar itself won’t open until tomorrow either.”  

I blushed.  “What?”

“Thought you looked the type.  The Red Beret, it’s the local gay bar.  Granted, this isn’t the Castro, but we’ve got our share around here.”  She gave me a knowing smile and told me the address.  Okay, I was apparently obvious, though I wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.  

“Thanks.  I didn’t see that yet.”  She nodded and kept walking.  Without really intending to, I kept pace with her.  We passed the Atomic Wrangler and I kept going.  I could see a shop at the end of the next block with a sign that read “Raul’s Repairs & Gibson’s Scrap.”  Guessing that this was the store Gibson had mentioned, I decided to head with it.  Maybe I could make some friends there, or at least meet some locals.  Preferably make friends I might later date, but meeting locals was also a plus.  

Daisy didn’t say much as we walked, she seemed to be keeping pace with me as accidentally as I was walking beside her.  I glanced at her eyes a few times to see if I could figure out where she was going, but she didn’t glance anywhere that might give away her destination.  Actually, she was starting to look...tense.  Not afraid, but cautious.  Like she thought I might be after her for some reason.  I would have said something to reassure her if it weren’t for the crowds.  Although there weren’t enough people to actually jostle us apart— which would have been a relief at least for me, as I could have gone back to see the Wrangler at that point— but enough that anything I might say would be overheard.  There were a lot of muscular guys, I noticed, most of them in dark clothes.  A lot of them wore at least one item of red clothing.  That worried me a little.  Wasn’t red a gang color, or something?  Maybe it was them that had her on edge.  Maybe I should be worried too.  

Reaching the end of block I nearly ran into her as I turned to cross the intersection diagonally and she turned left.  She recovered faster than I did.  “Watch your six out there, Jack.”  She patted my shoulder and side-stepped me, surprisingly nimble for someone of her age.  She had to be, what, eighty?  The gesture surprised me as well, my own family hadn’t patted my shoulder that affectionately in months, maybe years.  And I recognized the phrase.  Daisy from the military, my brain amended her title, she was probably a pilot as that was where the phrase was most commonly used, as far as I knew.  

“Check.”  I swear I heard her pause when I used military jargon to reply, but she said nothing, and when I glanced back she was walking away.  That was weird.  

The combination scrap yard and garage consisted of a large fenced in area packed with cars, most of them visibly broken down, and a small, fairly ugly cement building.  The building had been painted a happy shade of lavender and somebody seemed to have done their best to pretty it up.  A big orange truck blocked the driveway.  The side was painted with white lettering and a rose logo and read “Cassidy Shipping.”  Somebody was talking loudly on the other side.  Calmly.  It wasn’t an argument, but they sounded drunk.  I edged around the truck to get a better look.  

A woman with a wild red ponytail and a straw hat leaned against the side of the truck, drinking an alarmingly large bottle of whiskey as she talked to a battered old man who seemed to be fixing a toaster.  He looked vaguely Mexican, but he must have been in some kind of accident because his face was a patchwork of scars.  From his uniform, he was clearly a mechanic, Raul, I guessed, remembering the sign.  There was also another woman.  She seemed very small, particularly as she was currently on her back beneath a stunning silver BMW i8 with black stripes custom painted on the sides.  The beautiful blue lights on the front were turned off, as were the headlights, but the car still looked like something that had driven out of a science fiction film.  I wasn’t exactly a car buff, persay, but this was one of the few kinds of cars I knew on sight, and that was because it was one of the ones I desperately wanted if I ever felt the need for one.  I was fond of practicality as far as spending went, or I would have already got one.  As it was, this spectacular machine riveted my attention.  

“God _damn_ that’s a nice car...”

All three of them noticed me as I spoke.  The girl under the car waved at me with one filthy hand.  “You don’t want to know what we’ve found in it.”

“Great, the hot guy notices the _car,_ ” the red head muttered angrily.

I stared at her.  First off, either her standards were really low, or she was really drunk, because I was pretty sure that I was scrawny, not hot.  I had always been scrawny.  Second, what the hell was her problem?  

The dark haired mechanic waved again, this time dismissively, “Don’t mind her, she’s just hung over.  Are you here for repairs or looking for scrap or any of the other stuff we sell?”

Now I felt kinda bad, I didn’t really have any need for car stuff and I knew nothing about mechanical things, at least not anything that would make spare parts at all practical for me.  “Not really, I was just looking around town, sorry.  I just moved into the area.  I ran into a lady up the road and she said to stop by here later, so I thought I’d drop by.”

“Lady with a ton of dogs?” Raul spoke up.  I nodded and he continued.  “Yup, sounds like Old Lady Gibson.  She’s probably walking them to the plaza.  I’m Raul Tejada, by the way.”

“Veronica,” the mechanic introduced herself, “and that’s Cass.”  She nodded at the red-head, who was just taking another massive gulp of whiskey.  Cass still seemed prickly and between that and the booze I disliked her.  The other two seemed nice enough, though.  

“Is this your car?”  I addressed Raul.  Cass probably owned the truck and Veronica had mentioned finding strange things in it, so I guessed that it wasn’t hers.  

Raul looked shocked.  “Of course.  I can _easily_ afford a car like that on a mechanic’s salary.”  I smiled and he added, “The car belongs to James Garrett, he co-owns the bar up the road.”

“Oh.”  The man had great taste in cars.  It seemed like a good thing, if I ended up having regular dealings with him, if we had some point of common interest.  “I was planning to head up there after this anyway, is there anything I should tell him?”

“That we know he’s really kinky?” Veronica piped up from beneath the car.  

“He doesn’t open the bar on Sundays,” Raul explained, “But his car should be ready tomorrow.”

“Oh.”  That was a surprising number of closed bars, but I guess it was Sunday.  I wasn’t really after booze anyway, just people, and business connections, if possible.  Raul suggested half a dozen other bars and I shook my head.  “I’ll find something somewhere.  See ya.”  They all waved as I left, even Cass, which surprised me.  

The streets still showed a notable abundance of shockingly muscular men in dark clothes.  It was starting to worry me.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title's from a Meatloaf song. I had a hard time naming this chapter, so it's more the mood of the song that seemed appropriate than the title or lyrics.  
> More characters introduced, but Vulpes and Arcade still haven't managed to show up. Vulpes will be in the next chapter, part of it will be from his perspective in first person, I'll use breaks like this:  
> * * *  
> to denote such changes in narrator, just so you know. Arcade should appear in the chapter after that. This takes a while to build, just so you know. The one romance with get sexual fast but take a while to start and the other will be more focused on romance and the more everyday aspects of the relationship, but I won't say which is which. ^w^ Also, fair warning, I'm not entirely sure how to judge the rating, so it may get explicit when sex finally shows up. When it does, if you think I need to switch the rating to explicit, please tell me, I really can't tell where mature crosses the line...


	3. One Little Slip

Lately I’d developed a habit of walking aimlessly and somehow knowing exactly where I was in relation to my starting point.  When I say that I wandered aimlessly, I know for a fact that I did not go in circles.  My walking pace had always been very fast, at least when I had not just eaten, as I had when I kept pace with Daisy earlier, so it didn’t surprise me that I passed through what seemed to be downtown and had soon traveled a great distance from my own neighborhood.  I judged that I had nearly crossed the city, but I wasn’t a good judge of distance.  The sun had already set when I realized that I felt dizzy with hunger.  It was probably about eleven at night here.  

When I wandered, I usually got lost in my thoughts, and this occasion had been typical in that regard, so I only realized when I stopped that this area had the same strange abundance of men in black, and not the agent kind.  Okay, that was definitely starting to creep me out.  

There was a red building nearby with a lit up sign that read “Gomorrah Bar and Gentleman’s Club”, although there didn’t seem to be any other open businesses on this particular street.  A few houses were boarded up and somebody had painted an impressively detailed image of a golden bull on a few of the walls along the street.  The red building had lights out front, although the windows were tinted, so it seemed okay to me.  I had no sense of street smarts, but I wasn’t a complete idiot.  

If they served drinks, maybe they served food, I mused, hell, I was hungry enough to eat peanuts if they had them.  

Inside, the bar was like nothing I had ever seen before.  Used to pubs, the dark, smoky room was expected, but not the amount of space between patrons or the long red-lit stages on which scantily clad men and women danced against copper poles.  I had heard of pole dancing, even referenced it a few times in my work, but I’d never seen it actually done by a man.  For research on the topic, I’d watched videos of women sliding legs, arms, barely clothed breasts and asses along the polished metal.  I’d found them vaguely disgusting, but now I saw a man doing the same thing and the appeal became clear.  I barely kept the presence of mind to tear my gaze away and go sit down at a bar facing away from the spectacle.  I needed to eat rather than be distracted or I would probably stay here all night just watching.  I resolved to look up a video of the same when I got home.  Maybe I’d make this place a regular stop on my wanderings.  

I focused resolutely on the bartender, not wanting to get distracted again before I could order.  Turning to me, his dark brows twitched into a skeptical frown.  “ID?”

Oh, yeah, this was America.  I dug out my passport and held it out to him.  He gave me that look again as if I was messing with him, but ultimately took it.  I didn’t have any other form of ID and I realized with a twinge of regret that he probably had no idea if my passport was valid or not.  After a long moment of studying it, I heard him mutter something about how he should start forging foreign passports and hand it back.  “What’ll it be?”

And now for more awkward stares; I grimaced.  “Um...do you have anything nonalcoholic?  Also, do you serve food?”  

He blinked very slowly, giving me a look somewhere between pained and aggravated.  “One cola.  And yeah, we’ve got onion rings, sliders, nachos, and wings.  Pick one.”  I started to feel like people were staring at me and ordered fast.  Sliders.  Now hopefully this bar could break a hundred.  

He got my drink quickly and left me alone until my food was ready.  I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was either, because I drank about half of it in a gulp.  Now I could look around.  Carefully.  I didn’t want to get distracted again or I’d never eat.  

I focused on the patrons, all men, most fairly beefy, almost all of them in black and red clothes.  I got the sense that they had all been staring at me until after I’d ordered.  It wasn’t a welcoming feeling.  That wasn’t good, but I’d already ordered and I didn’t want to leave without eating, although I resolved to eat rapidly.  I needed ideas for my next book, so I took out the notepad I always carried to write down some character ideas.  The clientele here, although all somewhat homogenous at least in gender and musculature, were varied enough that I might be able to get some good ideas by watching them.  I generally only wrote about attractive men of around their ages anyway, so the lack of variety was hardly a problem.  

But where to start?  Much of the room seated patrons at tables or taller chairs along the edges of the stages, but there was one other man at the bar on the stool beside me, as it happened.  I considered him first as he was closest, jotting down notes as I wrote.  I had only minimal ideas for my next project.  I had yet to write a piece set in a hospital or dealing with a doctor, and between my lab coat fetish, my general attraction to doctors, and the whole idea of someone else having to examine one’s body, the situation was rife with the exact sort of possibilities I needed.  

The man next to me seemed like he would be an interesting doctor.  Within three months I would learn just how wrong that observation had been.  He sat with a calm, but attentive posture, drinking what seemed to be water, which struck me as strange particularly given the bartender’s reaction to my own aversion to alcohol.  Like everyone else, he wore mostly black; a black sweatshirt shrouded his torso and covered the top of his well-maintained, but slightly torn black jeans.  Both were a little too big for him.  The loose clothing disguised the fine muscles of his slight figure, making him seem perfectly average and encouraging the observer to overlook him.  Perhaps that was his goal.  The idea of a handsome man seeking to downplay his looks could be arousing, if done correctly.  I added that note to my observations.  There was potential there.  He was young, although his clothes made him look even younger.  He seemed about my age.  Beneath his hood, his face was handsome, but so nondescript that I could find few words to describe it.  He had the physical looks of a man who could blend in anywhere.  He wore sunglasses beneath that hood, even indoors and even in the dimly-lit bar.  They hid his eyes.  He was watching me.  

I couldn’t see his gaze, but the hair on the back of my neck prickled against my shirt collar, telling me when I met his gaze.  A chill settled in the pit of my stomach.  It had nothing to do with the freezing cold of my drink, but whether the cause was attraction or fear of the cold and lethal air of the man, I still don’t know.  For a full minute, he studied me and I watched him as if I was staring at a wild animal.  I knew nothing about him, I had a slightly larger frame, and I may even have the advantage of better combat training, but something about that predatory focus led me to believe that this man was no less dangerous than the twenty-foot crocodile that came to mind when I looked at that emotionless face.  

I broke the stare, seeking a new object of study and trying not to blush.  That was about the worst first impression I could have made, I figured, short of falling on top of him, but damn, he was hot.  I definitely hoped he would say something, but he never did.  My eyes scanned the crowd.  

A table at the far back of the bar included a bald man older than anyone else around.  He wore red with a thick black fur coat.  I jotted that down and kept writing as I studied the table’s occupants.  Baldy chatted calmly to the men around him; he seemed to be in charge.  Maybe their boss.  Some kind of...don?  My only real knowledge of organized crime came from the handful of scenes I had watched from the Godfather movies.  Probably a don, I figured, continuing to write and moving on to the man beside him.  The next guy was huge.  He must have been ten feet tall and I’d seen less bulky elephants.  He looked like he could bench-press train cars.  He wore a bit more red than most of the guys, and, I was surprised to see, he had a solid black kilt.  Or maybe it was just a dark tartan and I couldn’t tell in the dim light.  His hair was a deep shade of red, but I doubted anyone would dare insult him for being ginger.  He wore it trimmed short on top and grown into a thick beard over his face.  His body was hardly less hairy.  If he turned out to be gay, I couldn’t imagine anyone who more epitomized the term “bear.”  One small patch on his bulging bicep seemed shaved to display a small tattoo.  A golden bull, from the look of it.  

***

Surely a cop would never be so stupid as to draw attention to himself by ordering such a strange mix of food and drink, confirming his age with a passport, or openly taking notes in a place such as this?  The man beside me had to be an idiot.  I sipped my water and turned my head, concealing my disbelief in case his ineptitude was a ruse.  I doubted that, but caution had always served me well.  Likewise, it was prudent to observe everything that I could about the man before jumping to a conclusion.  As much as his actions led me to believe that he was a hopelessly clueless rookie investigator, it was always possible that he may be a scout from an organization that might aid Caesar in His plans.  

A brief glance showed me that the man beside me had the build of a human racehorse.  His face was elegant to the point of seeming effeminate by bone-structure alone; his shoulders were wide and as leanly muscled as his chest.  All his limbs were thin, almost spindly, but muscular in a way that led me to believe that the man could outrun most others.  Either that, or he walked for miles most days; both led to a similar build.  My gaze followed his thin and elegant waist to uncommonly wide hips and rear made large and powerful by virtue of his lifestyle.  Perhaps an athlete or a thief.  In the glance it took to confirm that he was not concealing any weapons in those tight pants, I noted in mild amusement that “racehorse” seemed to apply to all aspects of his body.  His clothing was dirty to the point that I could smell it over the stench of booze and smoke.  Possibly homeless, although his callus-free hands and silky, shining hair suggested otherwise.  A ruse, I suspected, old clothes over a clean cop.  Or agent.  Although agent of whom?  

He was taking notes, which hinted that he lacked the experience to memorize necessary details.  Amateur mistake, but then his age led me to believe that he was inexperienced.  Few organizations used men as young as I was in such matters, and if his passport was real, we had been born only three days apart.  His youth would be strange for a government agent, as would his foreign passport.  I came to suspect that he served a more underground power, most likely as a thief, given his build.  In which case he had probably never acted as a scout, which explained his incompetence.  

His food arrived and he set down his notepad to eat, leaving it open on the bar in yet another rookie mistake.  He paid as he ate, so I supposed that he had at least managed to realize that he was not welcome here, not that it was likely to matter.  With the subtlest gesture, I planned to order a group to ambush him when he left.  He was eating, and he would not leave until he was done.  I had time.  

I eyed the notepad, hoping to discern his motives from what he had written, but it was futile.  I had never seen less legible handwriting, I could not even determine the language.  It might well have been written in Japanese.  Even if he could be a potential ally, he needed to learn not to spy on us, although I applauded the tactic myself.  The equine man needed to be taught a lesson, as did the organization which had sent him, and to that end, it did not matter if he survived.  I gave the signal, just curious enough that I planned to observe.  I headed out to my favorite vantage point.  Since we had taken to this bar for our more casual operations, this had not been the first interloper to be dealt with.  

***

The man beside me got up abruptly and left without paying.  The bartender watched but didn’t stop him, so I guessed that they had some kind of arrangement.  I finished my meal fast, starting to feel tired as all my walking sank into the muscles of my legs.  The usual delayed reaction, but the past six weeks had taught me how to ignore the aches and fatigue.  I paid with a hundred dollar bill, ignoring the renewed stares.  At this point I just wanted to get out of here.  I would find some other strip club to avoid all this hostility.  Maybe.  The hot guys were still very tempting.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and Lanius shows up briefly. I'm thinking I'll make the helmet a strange motorcycle helmet, but it won't show up until later...although I also kinda like the idea of him just having a badass metal helmet nearly identical to his mask in the game... And yes, Vulpes has a normal hood and not the dog head, but he will have the dog head later on. I thought that throwing it in here wouldn't work as well.


	4. Welcome to the Black Parade

The night had managed to cool a little now, but the air was still warm by my standards. The dark streets were now deserted, although the ever-present light of the city meant that my eyes needed no time to adjust after the dark bar. Even so, I failed to spot the man who had been sitting beside me. It was as if he had simply vanished into the shadows. The more reckless side of me would have liked to speak to him alone, probably with some heavy flirting. I was, at least, smart enough to realize that cornering that particular man to flirt would probably leave me dead, most likely in a very painful way.  
I had an unerring sense of direction, so I knew exactly how to get back to my new house from here, and I set off that way, supposing that I should get some rest even though I really had little desire to sleep. I had little desire to do much of anything except wander, at the moment. My chronic apathy had returned with a vengeance. Heading back to the verdant path, I turned down an alley, skirting dumpsters, trash, and a man much more still than he should have been, although I failed to realize at the time that the blanketed form was a corpse. There was a light in the tiny house beside the alley, an upstairs window casting a glow through plastic blinds. I heard scratchy Frank Sinatra through the opening as I passed below, already lost in my thoughts again.  
As a result, I failed to see the five men waiting for me in the shadows. The first hit me with a take-down, slamming my back to the pavement before I realized what had happened. Instinct and memory probably saved my life. Although I was absolutely terrible at it, I had taken karate, and the main thing I retained from that was an instinct to tuck my head and right myself with a roll whenever knocked onto my back. Rolling was another of my shortcomings, so the move would have probably left me in an even worse position, but the reflex of tucking my head saved my skull and kept me alert and the clumsy attempt to throw my legs over my shoulder, by sheer luck, brought both slamming up into the crotches of two of my attackers, dropping one of the two to his knees as I freed my legs and pulled myself into a crouch. Between the dark and the speed of the attack, my thoughts became a haze. I sensed a gleaming blur flying at my head and launched forward, blindly head-butting the kneeling man. The concussive impact as our faces collided broke his nose and left me reeling as he slumped against me. A third man grabbed for my hair and missed as I fell sideways, struggling to shake my daze and stand. Remembering the window, I yelled for help as a powerful kick knocked me against the alley wall. This time my elbow took the impact and I swore as another flash of metal flew towards me. The machete gashed my shoulder, but the sharpened blade met unexpected resistance in the leather of my coat, and thus the cut was not deep. Cradling my throbbing arm, I kicked. I braced accidentally against the wall as I lost my balance and fell backward. My kick flew higher than I had aimed and cracked against a skull in the dark. A palm flew at my nose as I fell, missing its target and smacking me in the forehead. After the head-butt, the impact barely hurt, but I felt the strike crack through the man’s wrist, probably fracturing a bone. I had a notoriously thick skull in more ways than one. My attacker swore in a language I couldn’t recognize. The guy who had knocked me back the first time returned and swung an uppercut at my jaw, which I saw coming but failed to dodge. He cracked the back of my head against the brick and I dropped to my knees as a door swung open down the alley, blinding all of us with the fluorescent light beyond.  
“I won’t let you hurt my little Jimmy!” The voice was deep and terrifying, like a heavy smoker on steroids. Eyes streaming, I barely discerned a beast of a woman standing in the doorway in a floral dress, apron, and floppy straw hat. “Leo’s going to give you such a such a paddling!” She drew something from beside the door. As my vision faded, I mistook it for an umbrella.  
* * *  
I lay perfectly still as I watched the fight, letting the metal grate of the fire escape press an imprint on my body. I eased my finger off the trigger of my sniper rifle and lay the weapon carefully beside me. There was no point trying to get a clear shot now. My men had managed to intercept the stranger before he could run, which had been my main concern. If he bolted, I doubted any among us would have been able to catch him. Not that his escape truly presented problems, but as a relatively new presence in the city, it was tantamount that the locals learn to respect our power. Idiots who wandered into our midst in scouting missions from other groups were to be made examples of.  
But now the madwoman had interfered, and simply shooting the trespasser would force the police to investigate, likely causing the public and government realize how much we controlled them. We also did not want or need such attention so close to our headquarters. At this point I would discover the man’s allegiance and intentions by other means. I watched silently as he slumped against the cement. He had likely sustained a concussion and, hopefully, worse. If he survived, he would return to his home or base sometime the next morning. I would confront him there, openly, if circumstances allowed, as doing so would let me intimidate him and get to the bottom of things more quickly. It did not matter if he knew who I was as I would surely kill him once he explained. I knew I could find him easily.  
Still, his capabilities in combat were impressive, even if most had been simple luck. Before the woman had joined and chased off the last of my men, only three had remained, and of them one sported a fractured wrist and the other could no longer reproduce. For a profligate, such skill was surprising, particularly from one who seemed so inept in other matters. The men would, of course, be punished for their failure, but I found some respect for the feminine-looking idiot. Most men would have been killed in that ambush.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is a song by My Chemical Romance. Also, yay, Vulpes showed up! Arcade will start the next chapter.


	5. The Bitch of Living

*      *     *

I couldn’t believe that I’d had to go down three floors to find a stapler. We clearly had too much paperwork if it took that long just to be able to staple the damn forms together. We were also short on pens, which was why I’d started hoarding them whenever possible. As a result, my pocket currently held an extremely mismatched group of them, including a hot pink fuzzy one I’d picked up at a gay bar. I tried not to be quite that obvious, but I couldn’t afford to be picky. I guess Julie was right to complain about our serious lack of funding.

There was no music in the elevator, but as it passed the fourth floor, I caught myself humming Material Girl and mentally cursed the radio for playing it on my way to work. It was one of those songs that stuck in my head for a week after I heard it. My humming was probably the reason that the family in the elevator were staring at me. They were probably tourists.

I nearly sighed aloud when the elevator reached the sixth floor and they didn’t follow me out. I checked the room number I’d jotted down. 615. It was another John Doe, apparently, somebody found with no wallet or ID beat up in a back alley in the bad part of the city. They’d become alarmingly apparent recently and part of me wanted to look into that, despite the risks. Probably because of all these gangs vying for power and innocent people getting caught in the crossfire. On top of that, there was the poverty, vice, and array of people stuck in bad situations. What a lovely world we live in.

He’d been brought in by a frequent patient who’d skipped her medicine today and probably saved the poor guy’s life as a result. Lily had a tendency to mistake people for her grandkids, which had, in this case, led her to charge this man’s attackers with the broken helicopter rotor blade that she kept by her door. I didn’t question why she had it, her schizophrenia led her to do strange things fairly often. By her questionably valid account, the guy had already taken out two of the five guys and she scared off the last three. When the ambulance had arrived only one of the men remained and he’d been stripped, either by someone who needed the clothes or by members of whatever gang he’d been in. His neck had been broken. The paramedics who had examined him suspected that his death had been practically instantaneous. The only notable mark on the corpse that was not an injury had been a very small tattoo of a bull on the back of his neck. They’d found another, much older corpse in the same alley, but that was just an unfortunate homeless man from the look of it. Both were being autopsied just to make sure, but I didn’t expect surprising results. Normal life was sufficiently depressing.

John Doe had sustained a concussion, a fractured rib, a fractured radius, and an array of cuts and bruises, most notably a somewhat deep gash across his shoulder. I opened the door expecting to find a middle-aged drunk or the kind of teenaged runaway that typically sought to join gangs. Both were sad, but both were common, at least in my line of work. The man out cold on the hospital bed in that dark room was something entirely different. Oh. They gave me a hot guy this time.

He’d reached the point of unconsciousness where he would occasionally move, it seemed, because he’d knocked the thin white blanket off the bed and rolled onto his side. The thin blue hospital gown did nothing to preserve any modesty he might have when awake. The bed tilted up near the top, but he’d slid down, which caused the garment to bunch up well above his waist. Trying in vain not to blush, I closed the door and pulled the blanket up to cover him. Thank god the man was still dead to the world.

The cold room suddenly felt too hot for me to stand so close to him and I retreated to the corner with my clipboard, almost willing myself to just fade into the white paint. I was pale enough for that. Get a hold of yourself, Arcade, you’re a professional! I looked at the form on the clipboard. Right. Paperwork. No one here knew his name, so I’d just have to ask when he woke up. Age? I studied that face for an estimate, just incase he had amnesia or something. With his lower body covered, it was a lot easier to look at him without blood rushing places that I definitely did not want blood to rush right now. Oh, god. Twenty. Maybe. He could be as young as fifteen or a very, very youthful thirty. No, I was kidding myself to think thirty, maybe twenty-five. If that. He was young, possibly half my age. I should really not be this attracted to a man half my age. Or a patient. Or somebody who got himself beaten up by gangs in the bad part of town. He was probably involved in something, and I really did not need to set myself up for that kind of heartbreak.

His face was interesting. As some women might be handsome but not beautiful, this John Doe was beautiful, but not handsome. His face had fine and elegant features almost like a woman’s. His spectacularly muscled body more than made up for that seeming lack of masculinity, in my opinion.

I jotted down a tentative twenty in the margins. The black pen I was using was starting to die. Ethnicity. The guy was only a shade darker than I was. That was an easy question. Caucasian. Next blank to fill in. Gender was obvious, particularly from what I’d seen. Hair color. His hair was long and pleasantly wavy. It looked very clean, which would have suggested that he wasn’t homeless or down-on-his-luck if it weren’t for the appallingly filthy state of his clothing, or the back alley he’d been found in. I hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights in the room, but I couldn’t be sure of his hair color without more light. Besides, I needed the man to wake up if I was going to finish the paperwork and go home. He was my last patient for the night and I could go sleep as soon as I was done with him. Mostly, I was here for paperwork and to make sure he had no psychological symptoms from the concussion. He’d already been examined and treated, thank god.

The fluorescent lights cast a harsh glare over his skin and emphasized the bruises on his face and body, but they made his hair come alive with color. By the dim glow of the moonlight, it had looked black, but with the lights on, I saw that it was far from it. Each strand ranged from ebony through a dozen shades of brown into mahogany, rich red, fiery orange, and finally a dazzling blonde. The colors transitioned too seamlessly to be a dye job; that was his natural hair color. I supposed that brown was the predominant shade, but “brown” simply didn’t do it justice. His hair was fall. I wrote “autumnal” in the blank before I realized that the secretaries who would be copying it into the database probably didn’t share my sesquipedalian nature. I added the word brown in parentheses.

Eye color was next, followed by a dozen things I couldn’t fill out until he could answer questions. I jotted down what I could, mainly his physical injuries, and waited.

After a few minutes, I reread his intake sheet. I’d skimmed the blood test bit as it seemed less relevant for somebody who’d been in a fight and who’d already been given medications. I’d seen that there were no signs of other underlying diseases, but now I noticed something else that wasn’t there. John Doe was completely clean, not even a hint of drugs or alcohol in his blood and yet he’d been found alone in a back alley in the worst part of town. At his age. And there were no signs of rape. That was definitely weird, what had he been doing there?

His things were in a bag beside him, but all he’d really had had been the clothes on his back and a tiny notebook. Supposedly, he’d had a pen as well, but it was gone. I was starting to suspect that the hospital had a rampant pen thief. Somebody had already looked through the notebook in case it had some clue as to his identity, but I decided to check it anyway. “Notebook” wasn’t really the right word. The tiny booklet measured about two inches by four inches. The cover was incredibly worn leather, but I could feel the faintest ghosts of patterning carved into the material and the tarnished clasp that held it closed looked to be real silver. Inside, the lined pages were packed with illegible scrawl for about half the pages. The writing, which reminded me of ancient runes, seemed to take the form of notes, judging from the hyphens thrown in after each break, and the amount of what seemed to be commas in each block of text. I checked the last page. A vertical pair of Xs stood out on the page. It _was_ runic writing, or at least it seemed to be. If I was right, it was still cacographic, but for a slightly better reason. I didn’t know ancient runes from memory, and badly inscribed runes were even more difficult to translate. From the few that I recognized, the words did seem to be English. Or German. Hopefully the former.

Madonna came back into my head and I found myself singing under my breath as I tried to decipher the writing.

That was about when I noticed that I was being watched. His eyes were purple. Bright purple, to the point that they looked like contact lenses, but I knew that he would have been checked for contact lenses so they wouldn’t damage his eyes by remaining in for too long. His coloration alone was...dazzling. In a purely aesthetic sense. Not because it made him more sexy.

He blushed and that blush was contagious. I saw him adjust the blanket so it covered him a bit better. I tore my gaze from the man and carefully set the notebook back in the bag of his things before going back to my corner. Must not stare, must not stare... I dared to look up at him again and found that he’d pulled himself into a sitting position with his legs close to his chest and one arm resting over his knees. The blanket formed a tent that hid most of his lower body, much to my relief. He was still blushing, but he seemed a little calmer. His injured arm was in a splint, but the fracture was both closed and very minor. He was also on prescription strength painkillers at the moment, so it probably didn’t hurt him. He rubbed his head as if that hurt, which could have been due to the rib, but he seemed to be breathing fine, so I judged that to be the concussion.

“How are you feeling?”

His eyelids fluttered a little. He seemed dazed, which was understandable, and it took him a moment to reply. “Ow. What am I on?” He had a Scottish accent. That was another odd thing to add to my growing list.

“Mostly a powerful NSAID. I would recommend against driving, doing construction work, or bull-fighting in the near future. Also an anti-biotic and morphine. Are you allergic to anything we might have given you?”

He thought for a moment and started to shake his head before wincing. He was probably dizzy. “Not that I know of. Then again, I can’t remember the last time I took anything. But everyone in my family has had a nasty reaction to sulfonamides if they’ve ever had to take them.” I wondered if he rarely got sick or had no access to medicine.

“Good thing we didn’t give you those.” I jotted down the allergy note in case we ever had to treat this guy again. It was probably better to make that a complete note, so I asked what kind of reaction.

“Anaphylaxis.” He scanned the walls in vain and added, “What time is it?”

“ _Really_ good thing that we didn’t give you those, then.” I fought the dying pen to write that note down and checked my watch. “Three forty-five.” That was surprising. The night had dragged on, I was exhausted and had thought that it was already five, but my shift wasn’t even technically over. Then again, my previous patients had been about fifteen addicts, two beat-up tourists, seven people who’d been caught in a fire that was probably arson— six of whom had already died and the seventh had barely survived to land in the ICU— and one hypothermic baby found in a dumpster. It had been a long night.

I guess my emotions showed on my face, because this last patient frowned at me. “You okay?”

I sighed. “Yeah. The job just gets...kind of...depressing. Caveat Samaritanus.” I looked back up at him. Those purple eyes were...captivating. “You’re going to be fine, at least. You should probably keep taking some powerful pain-killers, and you’ll need to keep your arm in that splint for a few weeks, but the break was pretty minor.” Anything else I needed to know? I checked the form. Oh. Right. The obvious. “What is your name?”

“John Lachlan Maclean the fifth. Jack. Call me Jack.”

“The fifth?” I tried to write it down, but my pen refused and I threw it out. Not looking, I grabbed a pen from my pocket. He raised an eyebrow. I’d grabbed the pink one, hadn’t I? I glanced down. Yup, it was the pink one. But it was still a working pen. I finished writing. “Just to be thorough, do you have insurance or the money to pay for treatment? It’s not like we can take back having patched you up, so it doesn’t really matter.”

Jack looked around suddenly, frowning. Then he sighed and rubbed his temples. “I take it my wallet’s gone?”

I hadn’t really expected him to have a wallet, so that was surprising. But then again, he was clean, in more ways than one, so perhaps I had just gotten too used to the nearly hopeless. “Yeah. You were found with that notebook and your clothes.” I was too curious not to ask, so I added, “I looked through that notebook in the hopes that it might help me learn more about you. Like your name.” Not, for instance, that he might actually be interested in...men. Or to find out why he had been in the slums so late at night. “Do you always write in ancient runes?”

*      *      *

I grinned at that last statement. “I’m impressed that you recognized them. It’s a habit I picked up a while ago when I don’t want people around me to know what I’m writing.” Handy for those frequent times when I was writing porn during classes. “Sorry, it was probably hard to read; my hand writing has always been bad.” I glanced beneath the blanket to make sure that my cock was flaccid again and got up. Damn that doctor fetish. And sexy lab coat. And hospital situation. I really had to write about a hospital. It didn’t help that the gown didn’t cover my ass, although at least it hid my front. My gaze resolutely avoided the doctor, but I knew he was there and I knew how he looked, so I was still surprised when I managed not to get another boner. I pulled the blanket off of me and stood, shuddering at the icy tile floor. I figured that this doctor had probably examined me anyway, although I tried not to think about that, and I was cold enough in the small room that I wanted my clothes.

My whole body ached as I moved. The last time I’d been in a fight had been a lot easier, but I’d only been fighting two guys then. And they’d been unarmed, as had I. Something told me that these five either had a ton of experience or they were professionally trained. It was probably a simple robbery; I’d been stupid to pay with such a large bill. Still, they’d probably gotten more than they had bargained for in more ways than one.

As if reading my mind, the doctor asked quietly, “Did you lose much? You should probably replace your ID first.”

*      *      *

He frowned and out of the corner of my eye I realized that he seemed to be actively focusing his gaze on anything but me. “Yeah, but replacing my ID might be a problem as I only had my passport.”

“You’re a tourist?” I had, likewise, been trying not to look directly at him, but I did now out of surprise. The gown was short, and it left the chiseled muscles of his arms and legs tantalizingly displayed in the bright light. Abruptly, he turned to rummage through the bag, giving me a great, if accidental view, of his rear. His body really was beautifully toned. I could see his gluteal muscles flexing as he shifted his weight. I felt color rising in my cheeks and looked away, crossing my legs. Get it together, Arcade, you’re a professional.

“No,” he explained and I heard him rummaging in the paper bag of his things. “I just moved here.” What was he rummaging for? Was he checking the pockets of his pants? Curiosity got the better of me before I replied and I looked over just in time to see him pulling on a pair of tight black boxers. Oh, god. My gaze snapped to the window to stare at the dark skyline. That wasn’t helpful. The room was so light that his reflection stood out against the glass so much so that I might as well have been staring at him directly. I stared at my clipboard instead, holding it low to cover my lap.

“Oh. Well, welcome to America, for what its worth.”

He snorted and I heard him fiddle with a belt buckle. “It hasn’t exactly been a great first day.” He thought for a moment and I dared glance up. He had pants on and he’d taken off the hospital gown. His chest was less herculean than his lower body, although it was still pretty muscular. I could stand to look at him without quite as much awkwardness now, and I did so, although I carefully kept my legs crossed and clipboard on my lap.

Jack thought for a moment. He stood flat-footed on the freezing tile and I could almost see him calculating. “To answer your earlier query, I had a little under fifty thousand U.S. dollars in my wallet, but I guess it serves me right. I should have found a happy medium.”

Now I was staring for an entirely different reason. “Fifty thousand? Yes, why not go for a happy medium and make it an even hundred thousand.”

He laughed and pulled on a shirt. That carefree expression vanished with the view of his chest. “I...lost access to my money for a while, recently. It made me realize how much I needed to carry cash. I guess I overestimated.” The explanation seemed to have awakened bad memories for him, but it stirred my thoughts.

“Carrying fifty thousand dollars in cash? What were you planning to buy, a private jet?” That might not be a bad idea for me, actually. If I could afford to carry fifty thousand in cash and stay out of the bad parts of the city. Perhaps he was in a similar situation. That would explain some of the remarks and such, but he didn’t strike me as the type. Judging from the atrocious state of his clothes, he also didn’t seem like the kind of person who could earn fifty thousand in any legitimate way. Maybe he’d robbed a bank. I reconsidered, looking at him more closely. I just could not imagine this man ever managing something like that, but maybe that was just my idealism. He pocketed his notebook and considered the tear in his thick leather jacket. After a long moment of staring at the jacket, he slid his good arm into a sleeve and draped the rest of the garment over his shoulders, brushing his hair out from underneath.

I was done with the paperwork now anyway. I should probably just go home now, even if my curiosity was gnawing at me to figure out just what this man was involved in to get beat up and carry fifty-thousand dollars in cash. Most people I encountered who’d gotten involved in such situations were entrenched to the point that there was nothing I could really do to get them out, but this guy was only twenty, by my estimate, if that, and I wanted to believe that maybe, in his case, I had some chance of helping.

I guess I got lost in my thoughts as he stood there, staring out the window at the sleeping city, because the next thing I knew I realized that he was eyeing me expectantly.

“What?”

Those lilac eyes were even more mesmerizing when he gave me that bittersweet smile. Yup, the guy was involved in something. “I asked if you could give me directions. Getting knocked out kinda shot my perfect sense of direction all to hell, so I have no idea how to get home for the night, or morning, I suppose.”

Oh. I suppose the lack of money or...anything, did make it rather tricky for him to get home. “Actually, I’ll do you one better, you were my last patient for the night, so I’ll be heading home now, I can give you a lift, if you want.” It was perfectly normal, just helping a patient get home. Nothing personal about it at all.

He seemed surprised. “You’d do that? I mean, you just met me. Are you sure?”

“Yeah, although when you sound that surprised, I start questioning the decision.” I was joking and he seemed to get that, although he didn’t laugh.

“Thanks.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a song from the musical "Spring Awakening." I chose it mostly because of the name, but the song's about masturbation and the multitude of awkward boners in this chapter seemed to warrant such a title.   
> Also, Lily will be back.


	6. When You Were Young

*      *      *

I followed the sexy doctor to the elevator and then out into an employee parking garage below the building.  Passing BMWs and corvettes, I have to admit that my heart sank just a little when he turned towards a beat up white Ford Focus.  I could not imagine a more generic model or color; the only thing unique about the vehicle was the pattern of dents.  It didn’t look quite like scrap metal yet, but it had definitely seen more than its fair share of mileage.  I had to wonder if he was the same way.  I had never met anyone so kind and he kept up a good show of humor, but when he wasn’t joking, I saw a deep melancholy in his eyes.  His green eyes, I realized, thinking back as best as I could.  The man fascinated me and I recognized that such attraction would inevitably drive me to paint him at some point.  Probably from memory.  

The American car threw me off; I had to circle it to the passenger side after gravitating to the driver’s side front door.  I guess he realized what had happened, because he said nothing as I corrected myself and got in.  Inside, the seats looked practically new except for his own seat.  The gray interior smelled faintly of tea and hospital with a subtle hint of mint.  When he turned the key, the car made a rather alarming grinding chug before the engine settled into a more normal rhythm.  I guess the sound worried him as well, judging from the look he gave the bonnet.  I glanced at the dashboard and saw a number around three-hundred-thousand in the mileage meter.  That was less in kilometers, right?  As much as I appreciated the ride, I wasn’t entirely confident that this car could safely handle those nasty hills...  

“Where am I taking you?”  

I couldn’t fully remember the address yet.  “Filbert street.  I live up near the white tower, about two houses down from the top.”

He stared me a question.  

Unfortunately, it was a question I couldn’t understand.  “What?”

“How the hell do you have the money to live up there?  You do mean on the stairs, right?”

I shrugged, not wanting to explain.  Generally when I told people how I made my money, I got one of three reactions: they either hated me because they thought it was immoral, they knew my work and were awkward about it from then on, or they turned out to be a creepy fan.  I could foresee no possibility that this doctor’s reaction would be any better, and I didn’t want to ruin any chance of a relationship that we might have, not that it was any more than a snowball’s shot in hell.  “Yeah, the stairs.  I have money.  I work.  I don’t really like to talk about it.”

*       *      *

So much for the direct question.  Maybe I could at least find out if there was hope of helping him.  “Do you like what you do?”

Jack thought for a moment as I started to drive out of the parking garage.  Finally, he shrugged.  “It’s difficult not to like it, at least at some instinctive level, but...sometimes I do wish that I did something more..respectable.”  That was an interesting response.  I’d half pegged him for some kind of government agent or spy before he said that.  Now my brain was running more alone the lines of drug dealer or stripper.  He had been found practically next door to a strip club, after all.  If he was a stripper, he was a _successful_ stripper, but given his body, that didn’t surprise me. That “instinctive” comment made me think stripper was more likely anyway, but that was probably influenced by my own view of him.  

Stripper wasn’t really that bad, come to think of it.  The only issue was that he’d been beat up by people with knives, which sounded like he’d gotten involved in something majorly bad outside of but probably related to his work.   Then again, Lily had said quite specifically that the “naughty children” had carried machetes, and as confused as she could sometimes be, she didn’t tend to exaggerate.  What the hell had Jack done to get five guys after him with machetes?  That was beyond mugging, that was somewhere between lynch mob and S.W.A.T. team.  My brain started to form a theory involving some clever theft of gang money to escape from something, most likely slavery.  That was probably just a fantasy, drug dealer or bank robber were more probable.  Although his current clothes were pretty awful...which suggested that he didn’t need clothes in his line of work....

He sat silently in the passenger seat, a beautiful enigma, staring out the window at the traffic around us.  It was about four in the morning; the stock brokers were heading in to work and we’d have to drive through the financial district to get to the Filbert street stairs.  It looked like he was struggling not to fall asleep and I wondered when he’d last been able to rest in his clearly busy life as... whatever he was.  

The quiet was getting awkward.  

I turned on the radio.  The voice was definitely Madonna, again, but it took me a while to place the song from the opening notes until the lyrics kicked in.  Oh.  Right.  _That_ song.  I flipped through the stations, passing “Pornstar Dancing”, “Little Red Corvette”, “Watch Me Burn,”and “Candy Shop.”  Jeez, was every DJ horny at this time of night?  This was not helpful.  I let it play the oldies station for a bit until I remembered just how much I despised the song “Johnny Guitar.”  I went back to Madonna in the hopes that the song was over.  It wasn’t, but it was better than the alternatives.  

Jack seemed to perk up a bit at the music, although he still didn’t say anything.  He tapped his hand against his knee to the rhythm.  One would have to be deaf to miss the theme of the song, particularly after the fifth time it said “erotica.”  The next song was “Hot Stuff.”  Thank you, horny DJ.  

“Sorry, the DJs aren’t normally this lascivious.”  

He chuckled.  “I’m used to it.  I’ve been listening to this sort of stuff most of my life.”  That settled my theory into the stripper/pimp range.  

*       *      *

In a grumbling sequence of shuddering starts, reassuringly smooth driving, and waiting at intersections on lethally steep roads while I feared for my life, we made it to a street-side parking lot on a road a few houses down from mine.  Home again, I suppose, although I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to be here.  I wouldn’t have planned to return at all if I weren’t so tired.  At the moment, I didn’t really want to leave this hot doctor, whose name I still didn’t know, come to think of it.  If I had had keys, I would have fiddled with them.  I kept my key in my wallet, unfortunately, which meant that I would have to change the lock soon, but I was used to getting locked out of places, so I’d hidden the spare where I could get at it and the loss thus posed little real difficulty, although I lamented the lack of a subtle way to suggest that I wanted to spend more time with him.  

He stopped the car in one of the scarce and narrow spots and I thanked him again and got out.  It surprised me when he did as well.  He managed to seem even more awkward than I felt.  

“...well...”  

I waited for him to add more and when he didn’t, I prompted, “Deep subject.”

He laughed and continued, “Well, you’re new in town, and currently have no money and a broken arm.  I figured it might be a good idea if you had some way of contacting me, just in case, maybe, I could help with...anything.”  

I smiled and then frowned a little as I realized that I had, perhaps luckily, forgotten my cell phone.  I suppose the downside of air travel regulations was that, keeping it turned off for the entirety of the trip, I had forgotten it in my backpack.  I took out my pen and notebook.  “Phone number probably works best.  I forgot my mobile in my house, but I can write it down and text you so you’ll have my number.”  

“Yeah.”  He read his number as the cloudy skies shrouded the city in soft rain.  5550024601.  He chunked it oddly, keeping the American area code separate, but following it by the two zeros and stating the last five numbers in a set.  The end of the sequence seemed somehow familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it or determine why that specific series of numbers was so easily remembered.  I wrote it down and put my notebook away before the rain could blur the ink.  We watched each other in silence for a long moment and I got the sense that he didn’t really want to leave either.  

The rain escalated to a downpour, shattering the scene and quickly soaking my long hair.  “Well...bye.  Text me.  When you can.”  He ducked back into the car, clearly torn between a desire to avoid the rain and a desire to stay.  I started for the stairs reluctantly, half trying to keep my splint dry and half reluctant to leave.  I heard that awful metallic snarl as the engine started...

...and then stopped.  Another coughing growl as the car tried valiantly to get going and failed.  A third time confirmed that fate simply would not let us part ways tonight.  Or perhaps it was morning.  Standing at the base of the stairs beneath a dripping mess of floral vines on an archway, I turned to watch him.  Between the sheets of rain and the car around him, I couldn’t hear, but he seemed to curse the engine.  Then he sighed.  And brushed back his blonde hair.  And looked at me.  I shrugged and gestured invitingly up the stairs.  At the very least, he could wait somewhere dry and comfortable while he called someone to fix his car.  Granted, I’d probably be asleep if he stayed to call someone— between the potent pain-killers and everything I’d been through in this long and jet-lagged first day, I had little choice in that— but the idea of getting him into my house at all was still appealing.  

He thought for only a second before getting out and following me up the hill.  We didn’t stop to talk outside.  The rain would have drown out anything short of a yell.  

*       *      *

I rushed after him up the slick brick steps.  I don’t know how I expected his house to look, but the building he led me to was not it.  Beyond fifteen feet of lush garden, three stories rose set into the hill.  A flight of stairs ascended to the red door beyond a low diagonal wall that matched the rest of the white plaster house.  Below that entrance, the first floor recessed windowless into the hillside to the West and stood exposed as an above-ground basement to the East.  The third floor extended above the door and stairs in a balcony supported by four massive roman-style marble columns while similar columns rose amid the balcony’s white marble railing to support the red tile roof .  The few windows facing the stairs were tiny and set high on the second floor wall.  Soaked american flags in a Revolutionary war style dripped among the jasmine, dogwood, marigolds, lilies, and sunflowers of the garden.  A statue of a dog-sized dragon lurked beneath the small tree and three similarly styled gargoyles leered from the balcony above.  Those toothy gazes unsettled me.  It reminded me of the building my parents had often worked in.  

I tailed him over the slippery cobblestone path as soon as he opened the gate of the wrought iron fence.  Even in the rain, the air smelled of jasmine.  At the base of the stairs beneath the balcony, he paused to wring out his hair before climbing the dry red tile steps.  The door was flanked by an unlit copper lamp and a smaller wall-hung ceramic gargoyle similar to the other three, though it had a more friendly grin.  Someone had hung a cat collar around its neck and the battered steel tag bore a name that had mostly become illegible with wear.  From the scratched and bent surface, I could only discern the letters “ED-E.”  The ceramic gargoyle looked equally beaten-up: a section of its wing had broken off, the gray glaze was chipped in several places, and one horn had been reattached with red duct tape.  Jack smiled at the gargoyle and took it off the plaster wall, revealing the oversized nail which held it there.  It disturbed me a bit to note that that nail looked oddly red, almost bloodstained.  It was nearly the size of a railroad stake.  

With a crinkle of tape, Jack plucked a brass key from the statue’s hollow back and I saw that somebody had adhered a Chicago bumper sticker to ED-E’s back.  I guess the gargoyle got around.  

Jack opened the door to reveal a pitch black interior.  He flicked a switch by the door and a tall lamp lit the narrow hallway just enough to reveal the entrance to a larger room and a tiny travel lantern on the open floor within.  The light by the door had a beaded amber shade and a somewhat dim bulb; it would have cast an eerie glow over any room, but the color scheme of what I could see did not help that mood.  The floor consisted of southwestern red and orange tiles covered in most places with a varied array of rugs woven in Navajo patterns in shades of red, gold, and orange.  The walls were rust-colored plaster and the slightly high ceiling matched.  The hallway we were in extended about sixty feet into the house, passing a large opening to another room I couldn’t see before widening into a dark room of its own.  At regular intervals, the auburn expanse was broken by art in two very different and distinct styles.  From here, I could see two finely framed prints, one of an abandoned steel mill and the other of what seemed to be oil on water.  The rest were paintings, all unframed and all depicting various animal skulls on a textured black background.  They ranged in size from a series of three inch square rodent-skull paintings to a colossal life-size depiction of a tyrannosaur skull which covered a large portion of the wall just after the gap.  All the skull paintings had clearly been done by the same person.  Between the decor and the lighting, the house was disconcerting.  Was I really so sure that Jack wasn’t some kind of psychopath?  

A red door shrouded in a tapestry of a lone man walking a long and winding desert road stood directly beside the front door we were currently standing in.  Jack opened that door to a large closet filled with the most mismatched set of hangers I had ever seen.  The red tile floor continued, but inside the walls and ceiling had been painted black, and there were no paintings.  Jack hung his dripping jacket inside and took his boots off.  My lab coat was soaked, as were my shoes and socks, so I followed his lead.  I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by inviting me here and neither was I sure what exactly I wanted him to mean.  He seemed to read my mind.

“I figured you’d be more comfortable in here than in your car.  If you want to call someone, or...anything.  Sorry about the decor, I just moved in last morning and pretty much everything came with the house.  The previous owner just kind of vanished off the face of the earth and the realtors and some people I hired cleaned it up and got it ready to live in, but most of the stuff here belonged to the previous owner, who seems to have been...eccentric.”  

“And photophobic.”  I added, figuring that the beaded light had been his.  Jack laughed and headed deeper into the house, closing the door behind us.  This early in the morning, it surprised me how much the outdoors had lit the gloomy house.  There was a window in the closet, but no others were visible, and as a result, the dark was jarring when he closed the door.  

There must have been a hole in my shoe, because once I took my shoes off, I found my left sock so sopping wet that I’d rather go barefoot in the shadowy house than track water all over his mismatched rugs.  I draped my socks over my shoes in the closet, hoping that they’d manage to dry, and wandered down the hallway to find Jack.  He seemed to be turning on every light he could find, or else he was just exploring his new house.  I wondered if he’d had a house before.  His lack of clean clothes could also suggest that he’d been homeless, which seemed to fit with several of my theories.  Even if he hadn’t been homeless, this was probably the first house he had actually owned, at his age.  

If he was exploring, he explored very quietly, because I couldn’t determine by sound where he had disappeared to.  Trying not to blatantly snoop around his house, whatever my curiosity, I looked around.  The room at the end of the entryway held more rugs over red tile, as well as worn antique armchair, redwood bookshelves, and a coffee table made from a cross section of a sequoia trunk.  An odd lamp stood on that table, almost more creepy than the array of skull paintings that decorated the walls here as well.  It featured a taxidermy fox being clawed by a massive black eagle.  A spiral of natural-looking carved wood wound up behind the stuffed bird and held a light bulb high above them beneath a canvas shade in a pattern that matched the rugs.  Thanatocentric taxidermy lamps, skull paintings, and dark, red rooms; it was like the house’s previous owner had wanted to live in a southwestern Poe story.  All it needed now was a raven.  

A hallway extended from one side of this room beside a staircase leading to the third floor.  Two matching red wooden doors stood open on either side of the hall and stairs.  Opposite the hallway, a wide archway led back to the first room off the entrance hallway and I looked inside.  A pair of tiny antique lamps in opposite corners of the room cast a flickering glow over the gloomy room.  The floor here was tile and rugs, like the rest of the rooms I had seen so far.  A red arm chair and a black leather sofa sat against the wall beneath three tiny windows near the ceiling.  Here the russet walls were crimson instead, with a black and gold pattern near the windows.  A few natural-looking wooden tables sat haphazardly around the spacious floor as if they’d recently been moved in there to free up space elsewhere.  A massive and clearly brand new flat screen TV hung on the wall opposite the couch, taking up the only section of vertical plaster not beneath a skull painting.  They formed a patchwork over most of the walls here, only avoiding the area directly around the seating.  A plugged in black laptop rested closed beside an empty glass on a long, low table in front of the couch.  The green light on the computer shone like a beacon in the shadowy room, but the couch was unoccupied except for an overstuffed and tattered black backpack.  Maybe Jack would be coming back here, but he wasn’t in this room now.  

I checked the adjacent room’s two doors before investigating the hallway or stairs.  One door led to a bathroom covered almost exclusively in black marble.  A black door stood beside the shower, but it was closed, so I figured I’d explore the open areas in search of Jack before opening every door I came across.  Another skull painting hung in here, but the lights beneath the tiny window looked new and lit the room radiantly enough that I could actually get a good look at the painting in the dazzlingly reflective small room.  The paint had been coated in a glossy sealant that emphasized the waves in the black background.  The skull was a horse or similar species, represented in perfect detail such as I would expect from a medical text.  Now I could see at least some appeal of such morbid art; the technique was incredible.  Each tooth, each wavy crack, every piece of bone stood out in photographic accuracy though the off-white of the bone had been rendered with hints of a calm and subtle shade of cobalt.  Within the black of the eye socket, the hue intensified to a blue-white flame which served as a ghostly pupil and gave some illusion of life to the skull.  Something about it looked peaceful, which disturbed me.  I felt like I’d seen that kind of melancholy tranquility in patients on suicide watch.  

The other door revealed a walk-in closet currently packed with framed prints and blank canvases as well as a crumpled black bag designed to hold such things and the largest suitcase I had ever seen.  It was bright blue floral print, but could otherwise have doubled as a body bag.  Most of its contents remained stuffed within, but it had been opened and an array of items spilled from the over-packed bag.  In a glance, I could see that it was mostly clothing.  Colorful scattered socks, badly wrinkled shirts— mostly t-shirts bearing the logos and names of bands or travel destinations—, a few pairs of filthy and equally wadded pants, and, I noticed with a blush, a few pairs of scattered underwear.  The underwear, at least, seemed to have been kicked hastily under a pair of jeans, but the attempt had been shoddy at best, so they weren’t really hidden.  

I turned to consider the stairs and the hallway.  The stairs led up to a pitch black landing while the hallway extended past a few more skull paintings to a room as blazingly lit as the bathroom.  I headed down the hallway, still hearing no sign of Jack.  The paintings here were illuminated well enough by the room beyond, so I gave them a bit more than a passing glance.  A bird’s eye view of a ram’s skull with the horns pointing diagonally towards the ground.  These were a bit unique.  Instead of the black backgrounds of all the others, this painting and the two near it on the wall of this hallway, had smooth gradients of bright color as backgrounds, although the pale skull was still rendered with a halo of black which faded into the color around it.  The ram skull blazed bleached white against an almost pale sea-green background.  The edges of this canvas had been painted white.  On the opposite side, the triptych featured a canine skull looking down and viewed in profile.  That skull was rendered in dark shades, the colors brightening where shadows should be.  It was almost black, and the vivid crimson background brought to mind evil, for some reason.  The edges were ebony.  In the middle, a cracked and silvery gray skull had been rendered against a background which ranged from magenta to teal and bridged the colors of the other two paintings.  I tended to know a great deal about most things, so it surprised me when I couldn’t place the animal’s skull on sight.  It looked almost canid, but the sharp teeth were set further to the front of the jaws than any species I knew of.  It was either badly rendered, which I doubted, or prehistoric.  Probably some extinct carnivore that was slipping my mind.  Then again, the eye socket was really small, and the jaws were long and smoother than most carnivores.  I wondered vaguely if the artist had combined the other two skulls.  Or a wolf and a horse.  The latter looked more likely, unless he’d screwed up the proportions of a sheep skull very badly.  

“They’re meant to show shades of morality.”  Jack spoke from the stairs directly behind me, leaning over the railing just below the ceiling with his long hair tied up and hanging in a damp ponytail that brushed against my back.  I jumped at the sound and proximity.  Turning around to reply, I got a better look at him.  He’d changed.  Aside from the splint on his broken arm, he wore only a pair of nearly skin-tight black running shorts.  

My lungs froze as my body decided that breathing was completely irrelevant compared to making my heart race and rushing blood all kinds of places that I really did not want blood rushing right now.  For a moment, I lost any ability to speak.  

He didn’t seem to notice, surprisingly, but then again he was starting to get that sort of dopey look that came from high doses of prescription strength anesthetics and head injuries.  He stared at the paintings in fascination as he explained, “The ram represents good, the jackal evil, and the mesonyx is somewhere in the middle.”  Oh.  Mesonyx, that made sense, it was a hoofed carnivore, which explained the skull and fangs.  “What do you think of it?”  He added as he walked groggily down the rest of the stairs, “And sorry about my outfit, these are the last of my clean clothes as shorts aren’t much use in cold weather or Scotland.”  I avoided looking at them again, but now that I thought about it, his shorts had looked dramatically cleaner than his previous set of clothes.  Indoors, he wasn’t cold like that, but outside in San Francisco, in October, particularly at this time of pre-dawn, shorts were a bad idea, so it seemed reasonable enough.  I was starting to favor the idea that he’d recently run away from some kind of bad situation, given the state of his other clothes, how little of the things in his house actually seemed to be his, and how generally down-on-his-luck he looked.  I wanted to believe that it was just the drugs, and I had maintained that belief quite valiantly until now, but he had a look of exhaustion that I knew very well from personal experience.  He’d been through a lot lately, probably while on the run, and I was starting to suspect that he hadn’t gotten much chance to relax.  

He was waiting for an answer and I had to consider the paintings again to come up with one.  “Well, the skill and attention to detail are amazing, and I guess I like this set more than the ones with the black backgrounds, but aren’t they all sort of morbid?  Do you think that the house’s previous owner was the artist?”  

He gave me an odd look that he explained a second later.  “I’m the artist.  The previous owner’s tastes tended a bit more towards pollution and the apocalypse as well as pictures of sad looking people in desolate places.  And red, black, and orange.  Seriously, it’s like `The Masque of the Red Death’ around here.  I like to think that my paintings cheer things up a bit, by comparison.”  As I stared at him, marveling over his art for a dozen different reasons and trying to psychoanalyze him through the odd subject matter, he grabbed my shoulders and steered me into the well-lit room, which turned out to be a kitchen.  

The floor, furniture, and counters were redwood and the walls were a softer shade of orange than the oppressive hues of the other rooms.  A section of counter divided the room into a cooking area and a small dining room.  Both shared the glow of a number of clearly brand new ceiling lights shaded in warm colors of stained glass.  The bathroom’s second door led to the dining room half, which was surrounded on two sides by white-curtained windows.  Beyond the well-lit kitchen, the night might as well have been a sea of black paint.  The pitiful windows of the other rooms somehow seemed less disturbing than this grand view of an empty darkness.  Was this house ever not creepy?  With windows over every inch of wall not covered by cabinets, there were no paintings here.  The only decoration aside from a collection of magnets on the fridge was massively in bloom potted flower on the table that bore both a small and fancy-looking note and a white bow.  It looked untouched and Jack seemed too out-of-it to notice the plant right now.  

I dug my phone from my pocket, still staring at the unnerving oblivion beyond the window panes.  The screen reminded me of the time as I went to unlock it.  Not even five in the morning yet.  There was no point calling my mechanic or seeking a ride home; no one would be awake to answer.  If I had good friends with cars in the area, I might have been in luck, but I wasn’t really the most social guy and the few good friends I had tended to just take public transportation.  They didn’t really need to be anywhere urgently anyway.  Maybe I could call a cab...?  On the other hand, calling a cab left my car here, and I lived a fair distance away.  

I turned towards Jack and realized that he was rummaging in the fridge.  All the appliances in his kitchen looked as new as the blinding lights, and the fridge held fairly little food at the moment.  Over his shoulder, I saw milk, six eggs, and two rather large platters of fruit and lunch meat— the kind sometimes sent as gifts.  Finding whatever he’d been seeking, Jack stepped back and closed the fridge, holding the milk in one hand and a fist full of roast beef and cheese in the other.  He gnawed the wad of solid bovine products as he set the milk on the counter and opened a nearly empty cabinet.  Swallowing his current mouthful, he offered, “Tea?”

“Sure.  Thanks.”  I debated how to suggest what I half wanted to suggest and I guess I looked distracted enough that it managed to penetrate his haze of medication and fatigue.  I still wasn’t sure how much I really wanted to get involved with him, both given the age difference and the fact that he was so clearly involved in something unpleasant.  And there was the whole terrifying house and strange obsession with painting skulls.  Even without all the obstacles this time, I was rarely the one to initiate my relationships and generally awkwardness permeated the beginnings of such things unless somebody got exceptionally ballsy.  Literally, I supposed. I  tried not to think in that direction lest things get even more awkward.  

Jack was staring at me as I thought, water boiling in the fancy appliance behind him and two mugs on the counter.  Earlier he’d seemed almost shy, but right now he leaned back with his hips against the counter, his sinewy legs just a little farther apart than a normal stance, and his elbows hovering over wooden surface.  It was an extremely calm and confident posture that displayed his body to great effect, though I tried not to look too closely.  “You can stay, if you want.”

People under the effects of a lot of drugs, even the kind that weren’t recreational, tended to lose their inhibitions, and the same sometimes happened when people got tired.  That was probably happening right now.  On the other hand, I didn’t really have any alternative.  

“That’s very kind of you, but I don’t want to impose...—”

*      *      *

I interrupted as he trailed off.  “It’s no problem.  Really, I’m used to it.”  My family often had guests drop by without telling me and my roommates in college had typically been the sort to bed different partners every night.  Surprisingly, I had never gotten in on such action.  They normally hadn’t noticed that I was still in the room at the time, which was convenient, I supposed, because they would have probably asked me to leave and I never had anywhere else to go.  I guess it helped me in my work.

***

The roulette wheel in my mind stopped spinning, landing firmly on “prostitute.”  High-end or resourceful prostitute, given his wealth.  And I would be staying in his house for the night.  Part of me reveled in that notion but another part dreaded that I might be getting into my most ill-fated romance yet.  Either way, I knew that if anything developed from this, it would surely be one of the two extremes.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is a song by the Killers. It seems to fit the mood of the chapter, at least to some degree.   
> I've never really switched between characters in first person like this or as rapidly as I'm doing here, so please tell me if you have any comments about that. Does it work well? Is it too confusing? Should I put in names in parentheses to clarify who's narrating?   
> Also, does anybody get the reference of his phone number? I may or may not eventually clarify that.


	7. Bad Company

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a song either by the band of the same name or covered by Five Finger Death Punch, either fits as it's the same basic song.   
> Also, fair warning, I'm not sure what rating to give this and might switch it to explicit. This is the first chapter where things really got like that, so...be warned? Please tell me if you think it needs a different rating; I'm bad at judging that.

Jack and I stayed awake just long enough to each have a cup of mint tea. Apparently, it was something of a ritual with him to drink tea before bed. Herbal tea helped him sleep and I understood how it could do that even though I usually drank caffeinated tea to wake up or keep myself awake on those really long shifts. Or on the rare occasions that sleep took a back seat to sex, but that hadn’t happened recently. The thought made me frown and I tried to count the weeks. Months. Nearly a year. God, how had it been _that_ long?

Drugs, tea, and fatigue left Jack very quiet. He didn’t seem to notice my thinking and he wasn’t much for conversation while we sipped, so I let my thoughts occupy the time. Like the rest of the decor, the mugs were unusual. Apparently, Jack had brought them in his luggage and they were not more relics of the previous owner. It bothered me a little how much it seemed that Jack was living in someone else’s house, the house of a dead man, in all likelihood. Most people who went missing long enough for their houses to be sold weren’t found alive. It seemed morbid, as if every orphaned chair or table was somehow a memento mori or perhaps just a ghost of the man who used to live here. Then again, the skull paintings were hardly bright and cheery.

The mugs, at least, looked pleasant enough. I drank from a pleasant blue and green piece which featured charmingly stylized sheep painted around the middle of the vessel. It seemed hand-crafted, as did Jack’s, which had, for some reason, been sculpted to mimic a very large rook. I’d only seen two more mugs in the cupboard, but all four resembled each other enough that I suspected they shared the same potter. I drank and absently studied the sheep on my mug as I tried to judge whether or not it was really a good idea to get involved with a man who probably had at least as much trouble after him as I did.

Abruptly Jack perked up, gulping down the last of his tea around the time that I finished my own cup. “ _That’s_ what it’s from! I _knew_ I recognized it!”

I stared at him blankly. “What?” Oh, yeah, those prescription pain-killers were definitely having an effect on his mind. Or maybe that was a remnant of the concussion.

“24601. Your phone number. It’s a reference to Les Mis!” He seemed ecstatic.

I chuckled. “Yeah. Well, not intentionally, but I ended up with the number a while ago and I’ve made a point to keep it whenever I get a new phone. It’s very easy to remember because of the musical. And book. And movie. You’re a fan?”

“Of course.” I could already tell that his apparent energy was excitement and nothing more; it was fading fast. He yawned widely before adding, “I still can’t decide who I like more: Javert or Valjean.”

“It probably says something important about your morality that you don’t prefer one or the other, but I’m too tired to analyze that right now. Surprisingly. Normally, I’d talk all day; you’ve caught me when I’m much quieter than usual. I prefer Valjean, myself, but I can see your point, to some degree.” I mirrored his yawn, spurring him to yawn again as he checked his empty mug, forgetting that he’d already downed it.

He stood and rinsed the cup, leaving it on the counter beside the sink. “Well, I’m reaching the point where I’ll probably pass out if I don’t get some sleep, so I’d like to go to bed. Are you at all tired?” He leaned back against the counter and it struck me again how weary he looked.

I shot him a sardonic gaze. “I’ve been awake since yesterday at nine in the morning, thanks to the extremely unpleasant squatters in the building adjacent to my apartment. I’ve been running on four hours of sleep and it’s been a hell of a day, there is no possible way that I could not be tired.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that anyway. Was he simply trying to ask if I needed a pillow for the couch, or was he hinting that he was after something entirely unrelated to sleep— something that I suspected both of us were probably too tired for, whether or not it was really a good idea?

He shrugged groggily. “Sorry, didn’t know. Sounds like you have it rough.” This coming from the guy without clean clothes, who just got jumped by five men with machetes, broke his arm, and got concussed? His life was probably harder than mine. Maybe. Come to think of it, we were probably pretty even on the scale of sucky lives. “Well, in that case, come on. The couch can’t possibly be comfortable; your legs would be half off the end. There’s only one bed, but it’s frickin’ _huge_ , this guy could have had ten person orgies if the `Red Death’ didn’t get them first, and by that I mean the upstairs bathroom; it’s terrifying.”

I followed him up the creaking stairs to a dark landing. He pushed on the shadows and opened a door which had been hidden in the gloom. He’d apparently left the lights on up here, because the room beyond was lit by a single red-shaded lamp on an empty antique dresser. Jack hadn’t been exaggerating; the bed was truly massive, easily the largest I had ever seen and surely a custom size. The frame was antique in a style that matched the dresser with a gigantic carved eagle on the headboard and smaller eagles carved into the ornate posts that held a red velvet canopy and curtains, which were tied to the posts and thus out of the way. The colossal mattress was clothed in white sheets beneath a black blanket, a scarlet comforter embroidered with gold designs, and a very old, very faded green quilt that matched nothing else in the very red room. The top of the bed held three large pillows across the width, each stacked three high and decorated with smaller, more ornamental cushions in red velvet with gold embroidery. Bookshelves lined one wall and a window curtained in heavy red velvet kept the area over the dresser free from paintings. The bed covered most of the floor although a comfortably wide path surrounded it on three sides. A closed crimson door opposite the bookshelves seemed to be the bathroom Jack had mentioned and a grand black marble archway over a set of red curtains veiled another unknown area. Although a wardrobe covered another section of wall not veiled by the window, bookshelves, or headboard, half a dozen works of art still found their way into this small chamber. The only one that was not a painting happened to be a monumental four foot square print of a mushroom cloud rendered in colorized orange and yellow with a dull brass frame. Somehow, the other five paintings managed to be less ominous. Only three were skulls, although all had clearly been painted by Jack. The skulls formed another triptych, this time with black backgrounds, like most of the ones downstairs. A horse, a sheep, and a dog skull. The first was painted with hints of red and a mane-like black wave to the background as the skull looked down on the viewer with what could have been hate or defiance. The sheep, in contrast, had been painted almost silver with a downward angle to the skull and deep blue hues to simulate pupils in the empty eye sockets. It seemed to be looking down with a worrying sort of despair. Jack clearly had skill and talent; the emotion was captured perfectly, even if that did disturb me. The dog was the first of these paintings that I didn’t mind looking at, even if it was still fairly morbid. The skull looked almost metallic and gleamed pale gold while sunny yellow tones mimicked the look of bright sunlight on the bone and pooled in the large, dark eyes like reflections. That skull had, without a doubt, the most hopeful look that I had ever seen. I hadn’t actually owned a dog, but from what I knew about them, the expression was appropriate. I could almost imagine the animal watching its master return and wondered if it had been based off of a pet Jack had owned. Come to think of it, all three of the paintings could easily be memorials to dead pets, even the sheep. He was Scottish, after all, and I was pretty sure they herded lots of sheep there, although I had never been and wasn’t entirely sure about that. I had begun to suspect that Jack had either owned a horse or desperately wanted to, with multiple horse skull paintings and the next canvas that caught my eye. A black stallion stood on a hill overlooking a pasture where other horses could be seen. It was jarringly different from all the skulls and the blues and greens of the landscape clashed violently with the deep reds of the warm room, but the skill was still captivating. As if making up for the relatively benign horse and dog skull, the last of Jack’s paintings in his bedroom depicted, in stunning detail, a man sprawled on the ground, his face somewhat abstract and in shadow and his feet towards the top of the large canvas. Although it had the same black background as much of Jack’s work, the muscles and reflections on the apparently glossy black surface below the figure had been rendered in a rainbow of hues, making them look iridescent and focusing attention on the form by nullifying any real color difference between the lighter human shape and the dark background. The man was almost pornographically muscular, with a figure so close to Jack’s that I had no doubt that he had used himself for a model, making it a self portrait, I suppose. The pose harkened back to a pin-up, or similar sexually themed posture, but at the same time it seemed almost...corpse-like. The painting managed to be arousing and disturbing at the same time, vying with the atomic explosion for the already highly contested title of “creepiest art in the room.”

With the red walls, dim lighting, and thick, dark oriental rugs, the bedroom walked a fine line between snug and funereal. The curtains were closed and no other windows were visible, which made it seem even smaller, like an animal’s den. It could possibly be the least alarming room in the house, but that was tough to judge with all of them being so creepy.

Jack had gone downstairs while I looked around, apparently to turn out the lights, but now he returned and closed that door behind him as he walked wordlessly through the curtained archway. He carried the camping lantern I’d seen downstairs, but the room beyond was too dark for me to see anything. His return prompted me to turn around and I realized that I’d miscounted. There was the raven, depicted in flight just above the door, stylized and painted on the crimson walls. There was also something else, I noticed, looking more closely. Someone had carved a tiny bull in the redwood door frame, just a little below eye-level. That seemed odd.

I decided to use the bathroom while Jack did whatever he was doing. Once again, Jack hadn’t exaggerated in his description. The bathroom far outdid every other room I’d seen in sheer levels of terrifying. Every surface, including the faucets and even the grout between the tiles, gleamed blood red. A panel of crimson stained glass lay over one of the two sinks and judging from the exposed bank of lightbulbs above the mirror, I guessed that it had shaded the lights and Jack had removed it for good reason. Red lighting would have taken the windowless room from “slaughterhouse” to “murder scene.” A hollow to one side of the room seemed to be a doorway until I looked into it and found myself eye-to-eye with a door-sized painting of a glowering, charging bull with the thickest and most intricate golden frame that I had ever seen. By location alone, that beat out all others as the most horrifying art in the house. I emerged about as quickly as I could to find Jack piling the decorative pillows in the top drawer of the dresser.

“Everything on the bed is new,” Jack clarified, “except the quilt,which is mine.” He yawned again, and gestured to the bed. “Do you have a side preference? The window will probably make this side brighter after dawn.”

“No, either side’s fine by me. Did you paint that bull?” I didn’t want to call it frightening if he was the artist.

He shook his head, pulling back the sheets on the side he was on. “It was here when I moved in, damn thing’s terrifying. It gets even worse once you realize it looks like there should be a door there and I still haven’t figured out how to reach the balcony or the basement. For all I know, the previous owner could still be here and we just haven’t found him.”

“Thanks for the nightmares...” I glanced uneasily back towards the bathroom and took my shirt off, figuring that would be more comfortable than letting it wrinkle while I slept. Jack had already burrowed under the blankets and was quickly falling asleep. He lay facing away from me and holding a pillow against his chest with his good arm. I was tired enough not to feel awkward anymore or to continue pondering the pros and cons of a relationship with him; I lay down on my side of the bed and soon nodded off. His intentions, at least in this regard, seemed innocent.

I woke briefly after two hours, jolting awake due to a nightmare that I couldn’t remember. My joke about the bull might have been more accurate than I realized because all I recalled of the terrible dream were chains and that horned monstrosity. Faint gray light filtered in around the curtains and the gloomy room looked less disturbing. My arm felt much warmer than the rest of me and a groggy glance showed me why. In our sleep, Jack and I had bridged the gap between us and migrated to the middle of the bed. I lay on my back, arms and legs stretched out, likely because of the dream I’d had. I might have moved back to the side I had started on, but my left arm had been immobilized. Jack clung peacefully to my bicep, his pillows scattered around his side of the bed. He was mostly on his back, his right arm holding my elbow against the bruise on his chest where he’d broken a rib, and his splinted left arm draped across my chest with his fingers tensed ever so slightly against my shoulder. The dim light just barely managed to show the colorful range of his hair, which partly shrouded his beautiful face. When he was asleep, the weary look vanished from his eyes, making him look even younger. His breathing fluttered the graceful waves of his hair over my upper arm. I could not imagine anyone looking more serene, and that peace seemed to extend to the room, now that it was more pleasantly lit and the bathroom door stood closed. This house could indeed manage not to be creepy, I realized. Right now, it almost became...cozy.

Two hours of sleep could never be sufficient, so I quickly dozed off again.

Both of us, it seemed, were so exhausted that sleep clung to us for much longer than eight hours, and I did not wake again until the light through the closed curtain was once again pale gray. I found myself alone on the window-side of the bed, having somehow inched the rest of the way across while I slept. A bird sang outside and I could hear incredibly quiet music from somewhere nearby. Jack had a serious lack of clocks in his house, so I crossed the bed to the bookshelf where I’d left my phone and glasses. 6:13. Pm. Dammit, now it was too late to call a mechanic. At least I had the night off; I worked twelve hour shifts, so I usually had a few days off each week and everyone knew that I liked them to include Monday nights. Mondays were awful for work.

Well, no point lying in bed any longer, I supposed. Jack’s bed. Even though nothing had happened between us yet, it was an appealing thought. I stood and put my shirt back on. Once I was out of bed, I could see light below the curtain. Maybe that was where Jack had disappeared to this time. I guess he’d heard me wake up, because he called softly, “I’m here in the studio, if you’re looking for me. Just open the curtain.” I did so, just standing under the black marble archway while my eyes adjusted to the blinding light.

His studio was the largest and brightest room I had yet seen in the house. One door led out from the opposite end, likely to a closet judging from its size. The floor was highly polished pale wood, the walls were white, and one entire side of the room had been covered in floor to ceiling windows that offered a truly breathtaking view of the city and bay as the sun set over the hill behind us. The new-looking lights that covered the ceiling seemed to adjust to changing light levels automatically because they slowly brightened as the sun went down. Out the window, I could see a man on the balcony of the house next door, reading a newspaper and sipping a glass of wine in a jarringly checkered suit. He glanced up at the studio window fairly often, apparently watching his new neighbor.

Jack didn’t notice. He had changed since last night and apparently done laundry. He wore a pair of tattered, black, and paint-stained jeans with an equally stained white shirt. His hair was still tied back, though I realized that he had replaced the plain band with a silky black ribbon. His almost dainty feet were clothed in beige socks that bore a pattern of playful kittens. Frankly, they were so adorable that I found myself smiling at the absurdity that a prostitute who painted skulls and lived in such a hellish house would ever wear such a thing, but then again he probably had some kind of psychological trauma either from his work or from whatever else he was going through. That killed my grin.

He was painting now. The massive floor space here held ten different antique tables and at least thirty easels, most empty. Three of the tables bowed beneath the weight of hundreds of jars of brand new paint and metal shelves held the same beneath the groaning wood of the tables, effectively supporting them as well as holding even more paint bottles. Several other tables held more variety of potted plants than I had ever seen as well as half a dozen odd taxidermy animals, including a jackalope and a bald eagle. The table beside Jack had been covered in plastic and a rainbow of paint colors. It also held dozens of different sizes and shapes of paint brushes and a coffee tin of water. Only the two easels closest to Jack held any canvases and both were wet. One featured a finished depiction of a magnificent lion drinking at a dark pool. The reflection in the pool was an eerily skeletal version of the cat itself with red dots in the eye sockets so that both cats seemed to be staring at the viewer almost as if caught in some illicit act. The eyes, whiskers, nose, and the surface of the pool all looked wet, but only the eyes actually seemed to be wet. I didn’t touch it, but the light glistened off of them and the highlights moved as my perspective changed. The other painting seemed to be just getting started. Jack had covered the white canvas in a neon blue underpainting and sketched a scene over that in fine lines of gray paint. A man rode a horse along a wide road towards a city that might have been San Francisco. Thus far, the sky and clouds had taken form and Jack was blocking in the gray of the most distant buildings. There was hardly any of the color that he was currently using on his pallet and I wondered if he planned to mix more when he suddenly stopped and looked at me. “Sorry. I wanted to do something productive until you woke up and I needed to finish this shade of gray buildings before the paint dried. You have no idea how annoying it is to have to match a shade after the fact.” He got up and started towards the curtain, apparently expecting me to follow, but I admired both paintings for a moment longer.

“You paint everything so well, why do you do so many skulls?”

“I’ve always been rather...fascinated by the inherent transience of life.” Okay...that was totally not something that a sociopath would say. What was I getting myself into?

“...so they serve as reminders of your own mortality?”

He bobbled his head evasively. “More or less. I also really like the idea of adding life to death, in a way. I guess it sort of references the idea of an afterlife.” I guess that was less creepy.

He grabbed an iPod and speakers from a table near the bedroom and turned it off, silencing the music I had stopped noticing after I saw him. I followed him downstairs to the kitchen, where the city looked even darker outside the windows.

He noticed the flowers on the table and frowned. “Was that there last night?”

“Yes.” I didn’t realize the significance of the fact that he was asking. “I figured you didn’t see it, you were kinda exhausted and drugged.”

He walked over and read the note. “Oh, it’s the real estate neighbor.” He walked over to the kitchen and starting fiddling with stuff. I realized only now how hungry I was and debated asking for more tea and possibly food. Then again, there was an alternative to that.

He set the music up to play again and I realized he was listening to the soundtrack of Les Miserables. He started brewing tea and cleaned the two mugs from last night, apparently figuring that I would want some as well. “You know, seeing as it’s basically dinner time, I could order us something. It’s the least I could do. Besides, I think I’ve overslept my chance at a mechanic.”

He paused in front of the fridge and leaned against the counter. I hadn’t realized it before, but he seemed to be in a little pain. He hadn’t actually picked up his prescription, now that I thought of it, although he looked well-rested and his injuries didn’t seem to be bothering him too seriously. His breathing was slightly shallow and he held his injured arm against his chest, preferring not to move it, but he said nothing and gave no more obvious sign that he was hurting. Then again, maybe that was his way of dealing with it. Or maybe he wanted to hide it from me.

“I’d like that. Yesterday I met a woman who runs a garage down the street, we could go down there after we eat and hopefully she could help, if you want. If not, you’re no imposition. Actually, you’re one of the best house guests I’ve ever had, not that it was ever actually _my_ house before.” He struggled to scratch an itch inside his splint, and interjected, “I’d still like to eat something right away as well as ordering dinner; I’m really hungry.” He turned his back to me and rummaged in the fridge. “If you can’t get your car fixed, feel free to stay another night. Seriously, you’ve seen this house, I’d rather have company, if possible.” He paused, finding something in the fridge and closing the door, but not turning around. I hesitated as well, wondering if I should risk getting involved with him. He was gorgeous, and between his intelligence and everything he had been through, I found myself decidedly attracted to him, but I definitely didn’t need more trouble in my life, and Jack had trouble written all over him... Those jeans were bewitchingly tight. I found myself staring at his ass and realized that rational thought on the issue was just not going to happen with this view. I tried to distract myself with his hair so I’d be staring less awkwardly. Was it just the creepy house that made him want companionship, or was he pursuing me in his own, subtle and somewhat awkward way? Or, another possibility, did he want someone around due to some kind of bad memory or fear of being alone because of his past?

I took so long pondering my answer, that he added, still facing resolutely away from me, “Stay the night.” It wasn’t a command, but neither was it a suggestion. I don’t think he meant it sexually. His tone was...pleading. That’s what it was: a plea. He didn’t want to be alone, though I still couldn’t tell if he wanted me specifically or if he just wanted anyone he could find to keep his memories, or loneliness, or the metaphorical ghosts of his menacing house at bay.

I walked over to Jack and gently rested my arms over his shoulders in something that was almost a hug. I felt him tense beneath me and let him go, stepping back. “Sorry. I’ll stay, if you want me to.”

He turned around, making eye contact for a split second before the mechanical kettle clicked that it was done and he went to make tea, avoiding my gaze again. It wasn’t as if he’d been crying, but his expression was strange, like some level of horror and despair had awakened somewhere deep inside him. That was definitely the look of someone who was running from something, I knew it from experience.

He tried to hide it. “Thanks. I’d like you to. I mean, your car’s still here, there’s plenty of room, and your neighbors sound awful. It’s probably a terrible idea for a doctor to get so little sleep and you seemed to sleep well here.” Jack set a plastic-wrapped salami on the counter as he poured the boiling water into the mugs, leaving the level of his a little low so he could add milk. “Do you want mint tea again, or something else? The tea’s in that cupboard, if you want to pick something out.” He pointed.

He changed the subject to distract from what he was trying to hide. I had more than enough experience doing the same to recognize it. I let it go. He clearly didn’t want to talk about it and as curious as I was, I would respect that.

I expected maybe two small boxes of tea in the cupboard, but I found it packed. More tea could not possibly have been crammed into this cabinet; boxes, tins, and neat bags had been stacked to create a veritable wall of tea. Three shelves divided the hoard. The lowest block held the standard cardboard boxes I was used to sorted by color and whether or not they had caffeine. Those were mostly big brands and standard types of tea with a few varieties of each type. The shelf above that held mostly tin containers, some of which had once held things like chocolate and cookies but were now labeled with sticky notes as different kinds of exotic tea. The teas of the middle shelf tended to be tea-shop blends from England, China, Japan, and Africa, although there was at least one box from Canada. The top shelf consisted almost exclusively of bagged specialty teas, all of them from one of three tea shops, all of which I’d heard of at some point. I hadn’t been to any of them, and the one that I recognized most readily was extremely expensive. The man had a lot of money worth of tea.

I picked out a kind I’d never tried from the lowest shelf and handed it to him. We started discussing tea and I settled into one of the chairs around the table. Jack liked his tea strong and waited in the kitchen for several minutes longer, letting it steep. He spoke about half a dozen international blends and even though he seemed like he was trying to hide it, I got the sense that he had been to every tea shop that he mentioned. The British ones made sense, he was definitely Scottish, but Africa, Japan, and China came up more than once. Was he really a prostitute? Was there even such a thing as an international prostitute? Could he even really earn as much money as he had from such a...profession? “

You sound like you’ve traveled a lot.”

Jack took the teabag out and stirred his tea. “...I have.” His tone was guarded. Okay, you creepy, sexy, mysterious man, I won’t ask. I’ll just wonder. Silently. While the curiosity slowly drives me insane.

He waited a long moment to see if I was going to question him further before focusing on the snack he had insisted on having. Oh. Right. I should probably order food.

“What were you thinking I should order for dinner?”

He set that warming salami back on the counter and turned towards me to think. He shrugged. “I’m not an overly picky eater, as long as there isn’t alcohol in it and it isn’t insanely spicy, I’ll pretty much eat anything. Heck, my favorite food is sausage.” He blushed and added, “And I swear I did not mean that sexually.”

I hadn’t taken it sexually. Now I did. Yup, I’d definitely been right to suspect that he was attracted to me. “Well, you’re in luck with the food preferences, I’m not a fan of overly spicy things myself. Food, I mean.” Now I felt the need to clarify. “I was thinking probably chinese or pizza.”

“Well, if I remember correctly, we’re pretty close to Chinatown. I might need to step outside to check the address, or do you just want to say `the one on the stairs with the Roman columns’?”

“Best check the address.” He stepped out to do that while I looked up a restaurant on my phone. I heard the sound of moving furniture. What the hell was he doing? That camping lantern had migrated downstairs and it sat on the floor near the front door, where I found Jack dragging a wall-sized wooden bookcase away from the door. Considering the thing was packed with hardcovers that included a full set of encyclopedias _and_ bigger than him, I was amazed that he could move it at all, let alone as effectively as he was. I set my phone on the lantern and grabbed the other end. “Why exactly does checking your address require moving the furniture?” He panted and held up a finger, signaling that he’d explain when he could breathe. Together, we managed to haul the bookcase out of the way and left it blocking one of the entrances to the room with the only TV I had seen in his house.

“Lost my key with my wallet.” He panted and grimaced, rubbing his broken arm. God damn it, he’d just moved a bookcase with a broken arm. And, apparently, done so at some point earlier.

“How about I do all the heavy lifting for now, okay? You need to _not_ hurt yourself any further.” He chuckled weakly. “You should call a locksmith. And pick up your prescription pain-killers. We don’t prescribe medicines just for kicks, you know. Although kicks might require painkillers.” He laughed a bit more strongly.

“Would a locksmith be open now?”

“It’s the city, you can find anything at any time you want.” I realized the problem that statement presented and corrected, “The car thing is mostly a problem because I like my own mechanic, but at this point I’ll take what I can get.”

He seemed to accept that excuse and checked his address. He closed his door by tying the handle to a chair and setting up an elaborate series of secured and somewhat heavy objects to lean against the door, holding it all in place with gravity and a series of complicated knots. Never a boy scout, I had no idea if they were official kinds of knots or just his own strange method of tying things up. We ordered chinese and he called a locksmith, easily finding one even this late.

He only remembered the salami he’d been meaning to eat after all of that.

“Do you really need a snack before dinner? Shouldn’t you see about getting that prescription filled?” He crinkled the plastic wrapping of the salami, trying to open it as he answered. “Yes. I’m ravenous right now, have been for a while, but I have a bad habit of getting distracted from food. And I can deal with pain. I’ll probably pick up the medicine some time tomorrow.”

I sighed. “You’ve got broken bones. And bruises. You really should take something for that, even a half dose, if you really don’t like being so out-of-it.”

He seemed to be having trouble with the plastic. He’d cut one end open with scissors, but the meat was stubbornly refusing to leave the wrapper. I could tell that he was starting to get frustrated by it, but was trying not to watch to closely, though I wanted to keep looking at him because I was talking to him. His methods inevitably looked pornographic. I crossed my legs and struggled not to think about it.

“I don’t mind being out of it.” He kept struggling with the wrapper, tugging at it in various directions, all of which looked like a hand job. I felt a blush creeping into my face, but refused to talk to him without eye contact. He was being evasive about something and I needed to see his expression if I had any chance of figuring it out.

“So you’re a masochist. If—” I’d been joking. He realized that. That was why he’d stopped to stare at me, still holding the stubborn sausage. “...You are a masochist... Sorry. I’m an idiot sometimes. Most of the time. Forget I said that.”

He resumed his sexual crinkling, managing to inch the salami a millimeter closer to the end, but unable to get it further out. “It’s alright. I am a masochist, in a lot of ways, but it’s not like I need pain. I just...appreciate it when it happens.” Well, that statement could mean a lot of different things.

I fell silent at that point and he kept struggling with his snack.  I could look away now without feeling like I was missing vital clues about him, but that didn’t help. I knew what the sound looked like and couldn’t avoid picturing it.

I could only listen for a few minutes before I had to get up to stop him. He’d been partly facing the counter before and now he had turned completely towards it. He didn’t seem to hear me approach until I started to speak, at which point I was only a few feet away and he turned . I’d been planning to just take it from him and open it myself, hopefully with less...allure, and I’d meant to tell him that as I took it from him, but my voice died in my throat when he turned. First off, his motion left us standing facing each other with about two inches between us. He managed to feign embarrassment pretty well, but I saw the grin in his eyes. He was in the same state that I was, probably from all the crinkling.

“You planned this, didn’t you?”

He grinned and shifted forward just enough that we actually were touching. I completely ignored my instincts that this man was trouble, or maybe that was part of the reason that I pushed forward just a little in response. Maybe it was just that the iPod had moved on from Les Mis to ACDC’s more sexual songs. Jack might have done that on purpose as well.

“Not from the start, but I admit that I played it up after I saw you blushing like that.” He licked his lips just a little. That was all it took.

* * *

He kissed me. My mouth has been partly open because my lips were dry and I’d licked them instinctively, so he got his tongue into my mouth before I had any chance to close it. It wasn’t like I’d never kissed before, but I’d never french kissed. I’d just never seen the appeal. I did now. He slid his tongue along the underside of my own and explored my mouth. He’d been drinking one of my favorite jasmine teas, too, which left his mouth tasting like the tea and that got me over my main issue with french kissing. I came up with ideas for exactly this kind of situation all the time, so within a matter of seconds, I knew what I wanted to do. He pushed against me and I let him, leaning back against the counter. The height of my hips meant that I could have easily sat on the counter and let him take me that way, but that wasn’t what I had in mind right now. Later, definitely, but not now.

I wanted to get myself off so I could focus on him without distractions. My left arm couldn’t do too much aside from ache— it hurt too much to use the muscles— but right now I wanted that pain. Pain didn’t necessarily arouse me, but when I was in the right mindset, it helped me along, and that was what I wanted right now, so I wrapped that splinted arm around his back and pulled him towards me. My throbbing muscles barely moved him, but the tension tugged the fractured bone and bruises, shooting through my nerves like lightning. My good arm grabbed his ass as he reached down to fumble with my belt. No. We were _not_ having that.

I broke the kiss and hopped back to sit on the counter, bringing my legs up to pull him forward so he couldn’t actually get my pants off. I guess I misjudged my own strength, because as I wrapped my calves around his waist and gripped him between my thighs, I nearly knocked him over. The doctor was not only taller than me, but more powerfully built and, from what I’d seen while he was asleep with his shirt off, more muscular than I thought I was, so it boggled my mind that I almost knocked him off his feet with the pull that ultimately shoved our groins together. Both of us were definitely hard and I could estimate his size pretty well, but he wasn’t as long as I was, so it was less obvious. My erection couldn’t fit in my pants at this point, and the last few inches of my cock poked up over the top of my pants and under my shirt. My belt was tight enough to pinch it painfully, particularly given the angle of my hips and the curve of my belly. My paint-stained t-shirt covered it, and I don’t think the doctor quite noticed that I was no longer all in my pants. He fixed his skewed glasses with the hand that wasn’t still clinging to my belt buckle. “You have something else in mind?”

In answer, I ran my fingers through his hair and pulled him into another french kiss, pushing my tongue into his mouth and trying to mimic what he had done to me. I bucked my hips against him. One of his hands slid up to claw at the back of my shirt and press our chests together, probably forgetting the patch of swollen bruising over my broken rib. Agony shot through my lungs and I found that I could barely breathe. My already shallow breaths became gasps and I broke the kiss to get enough air that I wouldn’t pass out. He nibbled my earlobe and clung to me, grinding his crotch against mine. I held his shoulder so hard that the quivering knuckles of my splinted arm turned white and I ignored my body’s protests. My other hand slid into his pants to squeeze his ass and he slipped his own hand below my belt buckle. Now he realized my length when his searching fingers rubbed against my throbbing shaft. My struggle to breathe became a stifled moan. Did it always feel this electric with another person?

* * *

His incredible thighs tightened until those hard muscles hurt my thrusting hips. I groaned and pressed him back against the cabinets, tugging the soft earlobe between my teeth and grinding my crotch against his fly. My hand expected to find his tip just below the constricting leather of his belt, but I found his shaft and followed the throbbing and velvety skin to his tip beneath his shirt. No wonder he was a prostitute. His cock seemed huge, although it was hard to tell without being able to see it, and right now my view was mostly limited to the waves of shimmering, colorful hair that buried my face. His hair tie had fallen out at some point since we’d started. I stroked my thumb over the warm tip of his erection, rubbing across it a little more roughly than I usually did. If he was a masochist, I wanted to try to cater to that, at least a little. His entire member twitched in my grip and he bucked his hips suddenly towards my hand. I pulled him closer against me and he responded by tightening his calves around my thighs until I nearly fell forward against him. I knew he was strong, and so was I, but the man’s legs could have crushed bones. They might have, I realized uneasily, one of the men who’d attacked him had been killed by a powerful kick, probably from those same herculean legs. I guess they got a lot of exercise in his line of work.

Jack bit my shoulder gently, panting against my skin as he struggled to breathe. He seemed to be gasping a lot more quickly than he should be this early in. There was no way he could be that close already.

I was wrong, as it turned out. Without warning, Jack shifted forward off the counter, grinding his crotch against mine and clinging to my hips with his thighs as he shuddered with pleasure. The first jet of his semen coated my thumb as I turned to lean my back against the counter in an effort to balance while holding his weight. He clung to me, shaking, as the waves of ecstacy washed over him. I hadn’t expected that reaction, but I guess prostitutes might not actually get off during their work. Especially if he was usually the “bottom,” as it were. I ran my hand along the part of his shaft that stuck out from his pants, letting my coated thumb leave a trail of seed along the underside of his erection as it spasmed with further eruptions. Most landed on the underside of his shirt or dripped down over his jeans, but a nearly equal portion splattered my clothes and arm. I kept grinding against him, as I worked him through the orgasm. He rubbed against me in response, breathing so shallowly that I knew he had to be dizzy. Then I remembered his rib, the wide lump of a bruise just below his nipple. He clung to me with one broken arm and one healthy one, squeezing us together almost as tightly as I’d been holding him with the arm not sandwiched between our grappling forms. That wasn’t just arousal; that was pain. Did he want that much pain? Could he even breath?

I eased my arm back as his shudders dissipated to the panting and shakiness of someone struggling for air. His legs released me and slid along my own to the ground. We both stood still for a few minutes as he caught his breath.

“Sorry. I can’t believe I forgot your broken rib.”

“It’s fine, that was...amazing.” He dropped to his knees so suddenly that I almost thought he’d fainted. Jack shook his hair back and grinned up at me, his face level with my fly. Okay, so that was what he’d been planning.

He slid his hands up my thighs to unzip my fly and slide out my erection. I wasn’t as huge as he seemed, but I was fairly well-endowed. He took me all the way in without hesitation and I could feel the muscles of his throat shifting around me. The man had no gag reflex whatsoever. He tugged at me, sucking at my crotch more powerfully than any of my previous lovers ever had. Again, I reminded myself, he is a prostitute. It only made sense that he’d be excellent at this. I thrust gently at first, but let myself get more aggressive as we continued. He pressed into each thrust, sliding a hand up my thigh to pull me against him more and more roughly. Every move brought a soft moan from my lips, though he stayed oddly silent. I was close by the time the doorbell rang.

* * *

I pulled off of him and sighed. “Dinner has bad timing.”

“Or the lock smith does.” The doctor sighed in annoyance.

I considered the statement, staying absently on my knees as I thought. “If it’s the food, I’ll just get it and we’ll continue. If it’s the lock smith...” I looked at him, focusing on his face rather than the throbbing erection almost touching my nose. “I hate to postpone this, but we also need to see about your car. If it’s the food, we’ll finish this as soon as I bring it inside; if it’s not, you might want to get a bit presentable and we’ll see about your car once the food arrives and finish this tonight.” I winked and licked his tip as I stood up. I don’t think he expected that, and judging from his expression, the surprise almost got him off.

I started for the door as he found his voice again and replied, “Okay, but I would like to pay for the food. And you should probably fix that unless you really want to scare the neighbors.” He nodded at my groin and I realized that the tip of my penis still managed to peek out from under my belt. I shoved it down with a grin and went for the door as the bell rang a second time.

* * *

The sun had nearly set by now and it had taken inordinately long to track down the idiot with the notebook. I came to learn that had been mostly due to his extremely recent arrival. He had only reached the U.S.A. yesterday and moved into Ulysses’ old house, as it happened. The causal relationship was unclear; he could have selected that house having already gained knowledge of its significance or he may have been drawn to the Gommorah due to some detail overlooked in the relocation preceding Ulysses’ extermination. The man I had seen with him in the kitchen likely presented some clue as to his allegiance. I would have to look into that. On the other hand, the potentially Scottish notebook-carrier also lived between two very powerful and capable leaders who had yet to make their allegiance known. We had already petitioned both to support the Legion and neither had, suggesting that both were against us, perhaps working together. It would be entirely possible for either or both men to bring in an agent of their powers to investigate the Legion. Well, in that case, they would find themselves in far greater trouble than they had anticipated. If not, we would investigate them both in due time, provided that this newcomer proved no more problematic.

It seemed to be taking inordinately long for him to answer the door. I fiddled with the key in my pocket. Would it be simpler to let myself in after any occupants went to sleep that night? I planned to return the key anyway; I had already ascertained that my alternate entrance remained accessible. It would be a simple matter to ingress by that method in the future. But I had already made my presence known and I knew the house was currently occupied. I was just about to ring the doorbell a third time when I heard a mess of objects being moved from the door. So he wasn’t a complete idiot and he’d actually blocked the door. Good. He had potential.

The man who opened the door looked very different today. The clothes he wore not only flaunted his figure, but despite their stained appearance, they were dramatically cleaner than his attire the previous day. In those clothes, I had found him mildly repugnant. From the look of his previous outfit, I would suspect that he had spent at least a month homeless in open country, and for such circumstances he had managed to stay remarkably clean, but his clothing had still reeked of sweat, livestock, and several dozen less recognizable types of filth. Granted, this outfit was not clean either, but it served as a dramatic improvement. My eyes took in the varying colors as paint stains. They were mostly sterile— assuming he used mass-produced varieties and did not make his own— and even formed a somewhat pleasant pattern of hues on the white fabric. His tight pants had a similar appearance, and I drew various judgements based on all of that, but even in the twilight of the evening, I caught the glisten of a much fresher splatter that had nothing to do with paint. From that, from the flush of his pale skin, and from the wild look of his hair, I realized that he and the man in his kitchen had been intimate, though I made no assumptions as to the seriousness of such an activity. These were profligates, and even we of the Legion often did such things without any commitment, although that was generally with our slaves.

I did not wear my public Legion uniform, nor my more formal Legion attire, but the suit of my primary cover persona. I doubted that this man would recognize me even if he truly was a trained government agent, despite his appearances.

* * *

Seeing the man waiting on my porch, I felt like I had stepped into my favorite kind of novels. His face was a nondescript sort of handsome, but his toned body managed to surpass even the doctor in my kitchen. He wore a sleek black suit and hat which added to his beauty and gave him the look of some kind of uber-suave gentleman or secret agent. The timing of his arrival brought all sorts of desires and fantasies into my mind, most of them revolving around an orgy beginning with some kind of smooth double-entendre on his part. I found myself at a loss for words, sure that this man was not the food-delivery guy and formulating half a dozen different phrases about locks and keys.

My fantasies gave way to meeting the man’s eyes, which I found to be an eerie shade of pale gray. My eyes had been almost the exact shade when I’d been a child, but I doubted that this man, who looked about my age, could possibly have the same genetic condition that I did. Besides, his eyes would already be purple, if that were the case. That pale silver held a dangerous intensity and, though his expression was polite and almost friendly, I got the sense that he saw the way I’d been looking at him and had half a mind to tear me apart, and not in a sexual way. Okay, a threesome probably was not in the cards so much as a double homicide.

That hostility remained only in his gaze while he spoke with a melodious and slightly high-pitched congeniality. He sounded almost innocent, excluding that strangely menacing pitch, and the sound conveyed a charm which almost turned my thoughts back to some, more sadistic, version of the threesome idea.

“Todd Acerbi, journalist with the Chronicle, I hear you were attacked last night? Mind if I come in and speak to you about that?”

He was hot, and he was tantalizingly scary, but I had someone almost as hot and apparently willing to have sex with me back in my kitchen. “Sorry, but it’s not really a good time—”

He cut me off. “You should understand that this interview would also investigate the possible connections between the men who attacked you and the recent bombings of the Zelinsky passenger ferry and the USS America, and as such, this story would likely make the front page?”

* * *

I had intended to play to most profligate’s inherent desire for fame, but what I saw in this man’s eyes as he paused was curiosity instead. Interesting. He never ceased to surprise.

“I guess I should let you talk to me, I mean, that sounds...serious. Are you sure there’s some connection?”

* * *

I stepped back from the door and he followed. “Yes.” He said nothing more, and as curious as I was, I decided to trust that he’d elaborate shortly. The kitchen was actually really difficult to see from the room I considered the living room, so I led the enigmatic journalist there and yelled briefly that there was some journalist who thought that me getting beat up had something to do with bombings. I didn’t wait for a response. I was still kinda annoyed at being interrupted earlier, but this seemed too big not to hear about. I sat on the couch and gestured to an arm chair nearby. He took the hint, moving it so that he faced me over the natural wood coffee table.

Todd began with the boring stuff, it seemed. He asked my name, my age, my version of the events, and such before actually telling me anything. He took notes on a little leather-bound notebook much larger than my own. Quietly questioning me, he seemed somehow...tame. The lethal glint and cunning to those silvery eyes was still there, still visible in every silent stare as he waited for my answers, but it looked less threatening the way that six meter crocodiles seemed almost harmless when sleeping behind a wall in a zoo.

I was still glad when the doctor emerged from the bathroom. Apparently, he’d cleaned himself up, because I couldn’t see any immediate signs of what we’d been doing. Oh, yeah, I still had semen on me. I bet _that_ was a great first impression.

The couch was huge, even though I sat in the middle, so I wasn’t surprised that the doctor sat beside me. He frowned at the journalist as if he knew him, but said nothing and neither did Todd, who asked bluntly, “The man that you killed sported a bull tattoo; did you notice similar symbols on any of the others?”

I stared at him, frozen by the first half of that sentence. There was just no way. I’d know if...if I ended someone’s life...wouldn’t I?

* * *

I saw the shock on Jack’s face and realized that, distracted and exhausted as I had been, I’d never actually shared that bit of information.

“Oh. Yeah, sorry, one of the men who attacked you died in the attempt. His neck snapped. Probably due to a kick from your spectacular legs.” Wait. That got more flirty than I’d intended.

Jack sat very still for a moment, coming to terms with that, I figured. It was a much shorter moment than I expected.

“Right. Well, it was hard to see, but I had noticed a few bull tattoos and some bull jewelry on a bunch of guys in the bar I was in just before that.” He sounded almost perky, completely back to his usual self. Was he in denial? Was that just the way he dealt with things like this? I wanted to believe that, but couldn’t help but consider that faint possibility that this morbid, secretive prostitute was actually some kind of psychopath. Now that I wasn’t quite so distracted, that little voice came back even stronger insisting that the whole idea of a relationship with Jack was a disaster waiting to happen. It was probably right, but, as usual, I found myself attracted to all the wrong men. And there was my life, in a nutshell.

Speaking of which, that journalist was also really, really hot. And insanely creepy, now that I looked at those cold gray eyes. Yup. Two sociopaths. Maybe I recognized him from some list of America’s most wanted and we were about to be his latest victims. That was probably just paranoia. Hopefully.

The journalist either failed to notice my surprise at Jack’s disregard for manslaughter, or he saw and didn’t react. “Do you know the significance of these bull symbols?”

“Stock market good luck?” Again, I stared at Jack. That was actually a better guess than I’d expected from him. I had no idea what they meant myself, so my thoughts had been along the same lines.

Todd shook his head. “Not in the least. The bull has long been an emblem of—”

The doorbell interrupted him and I was the first to react. It was the food, I discovered when I opened the door. With the sun setting, the creepy house had started to grow dark, so I turned on some of the sparse lights as I stopped in the kitchen in the hope of getting the food onto actual plates. I got the sense that Jack wouldn’t have cared, but I did, and I’d rather focus on such simple things as dumplings, rice, and egg rolls than worry about getting involved with Jack or the sense that this journalist concealed a homicidal nature. I tended to fall into an almost domestic role pretty early on in most of my relationships, but dishing up food in the kitchen of a man I’d only met less than a day ago seemed like a new record for settling in. Settling in? I hadn’t moved in. ...per-say. I still had an apartment. It was probably best to keep it that way, I told myself.

I also listened to the journalist in the other room to keep my mind off such things. He’d continued his explanation around the time I’d headed into the kitchen, but I got the gist pretty quickly. The bull was apparently some kind of gang symbol for a massive organization called the Legion. Predictably, given the name, they based various aspects of the group on ancient Rome. Only men could join, they identified themselves by the bull logo, and they also happened to be both the largest gang of slave-traders in the world and one of the biggest terrorist organizations. Lovely. He’d lowered his voice a little as he explained, or else the walls were just thicker than I’d expected, because I could barely hear him and he probably thought that only Jack heard the description. There was also an odd tone to his voice as he talked about them, something almost bordering admiration. That was a little worrying.

I hurried back to my Pandora’s Box of a paramour with the food, not willing to leave him alone with a probably murderous and possibly terrorist journalist any longer.

* * *

I stood as the doctor sat down beside Jack and set the plates on the low table. I understood that he was a doctor from the look of his clothing, the coloration of the edge of an ID tag sticking out of his back pocket, and the fact that he’d used a surgical kind of stitch to mend a small tear in his sleeve. I picked up no obvious clues to his loyalties and had no good opportunity at the moment to determine them. I would look into that later. Jack, the man who had evaded my men the previous night, was either a naive and unlucky tourist or a very good liar. I did not expect him to be the latter, but getting such answers could hardly be done while he had company. I would return when he was alone and make him tell me, and depending on the answers, he could easily meet a similar fate to Ulysses.

“That’s all that I needed to know, than you for your time.” I started to leave and Jack followed.

“Let me show you out.” The door was barely twenty feet away, visible as soon as I stepped towards it from the chair, so he hardly thought that I might get lost on the way. He wanted to move whatever had kept it shut back into place. Which reminded me...

“Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot...” I drew the key from my pocket and held it out to him. In the dark, and having only seen if for a few hours before it’s loss, I doubted that he would recognize it by sight, but surely context would enlighten him. “I found it while investigating the scene.”

He took the key. “Thanks. No sign of my wallet or passport, by any chance?”

I shook my head.

“Damn. Sorry. Thank you, again.” I nodded and left. Perhaps having the key would reassure him, making it that much easier to break his resistance when I returned, probably late at night. Night made such things much easier, not to mention more entertaining. Besides, I liked the cool, clear California nights. They were nothing like home.


	8. Down the Road to Eternity

* * *

With the reporter gone, we ate fairly quickly. Either Jack realized that it was late and we still needed to see about my car, or he was just very hungry. Whatever the reason, neither of us said much during that dinner. It was kind of impressive to see Jack eat; I’ve never known anyone to eat so quickly without appearing to do so. He finished his entire meal before I finished my second egg roll, and I was actively trying to eat fast. He called the locksmith again to tell him that he wasn’t needed anymore and then sat down. It was like the man could not tolerate doing nothing. At first he sat down calmly and looked relaxed, then he leaned forward and watched me eat, and finally he started fidgeting with a massive silver ring on his middle finger. I could tell that he was impatient almost as effortlessly as I could tell that he was trying very hard, albeit unsuccessfully, to hide it. But I couldn’t exactly eat faster.

I guess he felt like he was rushing me because he looked over apologetically and remarked, “Sorry, I’m not used to being able to be idle. I’m not sure what to do with myself. Take your time.”

I nodded, trying not to eat any slower by replying, given how impatient he seemed. That could get annoying if he was always like that, but on the other hand, I understood the sentiment.

He twisted his ring around his finger for several more minutes while I finished eating and then we set out. I actually knew the area pretty well, but I wasn’t sure if I should let him know that or not. The problem was, my reasons for knowing this area involved two friends I knew due to...rather shady reasons, reasons I definitely couldn’t let Jack know about right now. I also wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to risk running into either of them with a prostitute half my age who currently had semen on his clothes. Not that it was easy to see. I was probably just being paranoid; I doubted that I’d run into either of them this late in the evening, they probably didn’t stay out this late, right?

Jack seemed a bit different now that we’d eaten. Maybe he just wasn’t tired, drugged, or ravenous, but he was acting...perky. He had a spring in his step that bounced his long hair so that it caught the light of the setting sun. He hadn’t exactly seemed gloomy earlier, but now he had a hint of a smile whatever he was looking at. He looked over at me almost as much as he looked around the lush garden that enveloped the stairs. Of course he lived on the stairs, I mused, the stairs were probably the most beautiful, Eden-like part of the city, and this young Apollo had to be found in some place as stunning and unlikely as he was.

He suddenly nodded at the shadow under a rosebush in one of his neighbor’s gardens. “Cat.” Granted, my glasses weren’t the newest or cleanest, and my vision, obviously, wasn’t amazing, but as much as I stared at the shadow, there didn’t seem to be anything but visible mulch under the bush.

“Are you sure?”

Jack started to nod and reply, but didn’t get a chance to open his mouth. There was indeed a cat under the bush, because I barely finished my question when it shot out, crossed the stairs, and launched into a wall of shrubbery. The streak of gleaming black fur moved so quickly that I only knew it was a cat because it was too big and too small to be any other animal. Good thing I wasn’t superstitious.

“Do you always see things that no one else does?”

He laughed. “Well, that’s a rather fantastic way of putting it; I’m just good at spotting things when I’m paying attention and not, you know, drugged, concussed, starving, or dozing off.”

“Speaking of which, you still need to fill that prescription.” He started walking slowly up the hill and I followed, still talking. “I’ll keep reminding you until you do that, and believe me when I say that I’m very very good at speaking incessantly enough that people do what I say just to get me to shut up. I _will_ talk your ear off until you get your medicine.”

He laughed again. “That’s hardly a good incentive for me. I rather like listening to you talk.”

“Oh?” Well, that was surprising. “The general consensus, as far as I can tell, puts me somewhere between `annoying’ and `insufferable’.”

“And you use that to your advantage, I’m sure, you clever, clever man.” That smirk had grown to a crooked grin. Which only added to his stunning looks. God damn, the man was gorgeous.

“Has anyone ever told you how incredibly charming you are?”

The smile stayed, a little less lopsided, but it left his eyes. They seemed oddly...hollow, the way they had earlier when he’d almost begged me to stay. “No. My general descriptors range from `downer’ to `deadbeat.’” What had this young man gone through to make him this way?

Determined to cheer him up, I noted aloud, “And yet you can’t sit five minutes without something to do. I know you don’t mind pain, but are you afraid that you won’t be able to paint if you’re out of it, or something?”

“Something like that,” he admitted quietly. I actually got an answer out of him, for once? That was new. I didn’t press my luck for another.

I changed the subject, jumping to the first thing on my mind after that. “You just arrived in the city, right? Is that what that painting you were working on earlier is about?”

He nodded. “The horse is just because I like horses. And tend to represent myself as them in paintings. In this case, more the former than the latter.” Maybe he wasn’t a sociopath, I supposed, noticing the smile already creeping back into his eyes, maybe he just bounced back fast from bad experiences. Which usually meant that he’d been through a lot of them. I wished he would open up to me about that, the poor guy certainly seemed like he didn’t have anyone else. I wanted to help him, almost as much as I wanted to be with him, it wasn’t just lust, although I had to admit that that played some part. Still, the young man was tangled up in things well beyond the level of stuff I normally dealt with, and I knew that I would want to get involved to help him almost as much as I knew that I really didn’t need more trouble in my life. I had plenty of that already.

“Arcade Israel Gannon!” And here was more, albeit fairly benign trouble this time. The shrill cry made me flinch and I guess it startled Jack more because the younger man jumped and nearly fell backwards down the stairs. He scrambled into a more stable stance and turned to look at me as the speaker trotted up the stairs behind us.

“You have a very beautiful name,” Jack observed calmly. Wait a second. Why was he only saying that now? He must have heard it before...unless...

I groaned. “Sorry, I never introduced myself, did I? And now I have another introduction, I suppose. Jack, this is—”

“Hi, Daisy.” They shook hands while I blinked in surprise.

“You know each other?”

Daisy laughed loudly, “We ran into each other the other day when Gibson’s dogs assaulted him.”

“Assaulted by dogs, beat up by some kind of terrorist gang, can’t have an uneventful day, can you?” I chuckled and Jack’s grin returned in force.

Jack shrugged, “Apparently, in this city I can’t. Or maybe I just tend to attract adventure. I have stories. I haven’t told you about the time I got lost in the Paris catacombs when I was ten.”

Well _that_ explained a lot. No wonder he was so morbid.

“What did ya do to get beat up by terrorists? I didn’t think they usually went for that kind of thing.” Daisy looked light-hearted and her tone was casual, but I knew her well enough to pick up on that tiny hint of an edge to her voice. What? Were we particularly leery of terrorists now? Not that terrorists were ever a good thing, I’d just been hoping that they had no reason to target me _specifically_. Maybe I was wrong.

Jack shrugged. “No idea, I guess I just walked down the wrong back alley. Maybe they were after someone else and thought I was him?” He sounded sincere. He had to be a great liar; there was no way that somebody could provoke five guys to attack him with machetes and have no idea what they did. And mistaken identity seemed even more unlikely. Jack had bright lilac eyes, colorful hair, and yesterday the look and smell of his clothes would have been unmistakable. What the hell was he hiding?

Daisy seemed to accept that as much as I did, but she said nothing and nodded. “Well at least you seem to be making friends, although I would expect _someone_ to at least pay me a visit if he’s in the neighborhood and not flinch when I show up like I’m the ghost of christmas past!”

I raised my hands in surrender, “Sorry, I was going to, I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Staying here overnight wasn’t exactly planned—”

Daisy seemed to take that the wrong way and cast a long gaze over Jack’s shirt, particularly at the fresh stains that he seemed to have forgotten about. She gave me a look which clearly said, “I’m not going to say anything now, but he’s half your age, and you’re going to get an earful from me later.”

“Not what I meant. My car broke down and we were just headed to some garage Jack mentioned to see if someone there can fix it.” Jack seemed to be staying out of this, but when I glanced over at him, I noticed the way he was eyeing me just a little suggestively. I’m pretty sure I blushed as much as I tried not to. We should definitely fix my car quickly so we could move on to...other things.

Daisy narrowed her eyes. “Uh-huh. Well, if you’re _really_ headed for a garage, Gibson’s should still be open and it’s just over the hill, but she’s got a few screws outta place, by my book, so ya might be better off if I have a look at it.”

I sighed and started up the stairs with Jack, expecting her to follow. More to reduce her suspicion, I pointed out, “Daisy, you’ve seen my car. I shouldn’t be surprised that it finally stopped working.” Although this was surely the best possible timing that it could have had.

“Whatever you say...” She clearly knew that at least my implied meaning was a lie, Jack’s shirt made that much obvious.

* * *

I led the way to the garage, which was still open, and not only was Gibson there, but so were Veronica, the old-timer Raul, and cranky Cassidy. “Well that explains that,” she muttered after taking one glance at me and Arcade. She slunk further into the shop, most likely to replace her nearly empty bottle of whiskey. I ignored her. Between the awkwardness between him and Daisy, the fact that we were here about his car, and the fact that I knew nothing of practical value about cars aside from which were really pretty, I let Arcade sort things out. He talked Gibson into going over to take a look at it and upon hearing Daisy remark on the car’s age and condition, Raul and Veronica joined the little car-repair expedition out of curiousity. With three people over seventy in the group (I placed Gibson and Daisy around seventy or so and Raul was probably closer to a hundred, although he was amazingly spry for that age) Veronica and I ended up pacing each other ahead of everyone with Arcade a little behind me to, as he explained to me in a whisper, “make sure Daisy didn’t stir up any trouble.” Daisy and Gibson did seem to have quite the rivalry going, I could hear them arguing about the car’s most likely problems from over ten feet ahead of the group.

Both Raul and Veronica still wore their greasy mechanic’s uniforms, possibly the same ones as yesterday, which weren’t really the most flattering outfits, and I wasn’t one to judge women in particular, but as far as basic aesthetics, I realized, Veronica seemed fairly pretty. She had a somewhat misshapen brown knitted hat that hid her hair, but her face looked nice and she seemed otherwise shapely, although a bit small. I was almost a full foot taller than her, so she was probably around five and a half feet. The same as the reporter, I realized, although his sheer ability to intimidate made him seem much bigger while something about her cheer had the opposite effect for her. She seemed almost doll-like, even though the average person wasn’t much taller than her. Heck, Raul, Gibson, and Daisy were also about as tall as Veronica; Arcade and I towered over them all.

“What happened?” Veronica nodded at my splinted arm.

“I got mugged,” I explained, a little distracted by a frantic clattering in the bushes near the top of the hill. Veronica and I had pulled even further ahead of the others, so they probably couldn’t see it and Veronica didn’t notice until I did.

“Damn, your first day here and you already got beat up, I guess the city isn’t making a good impression.” She followed me at a trot to the rustling bush. The dog from the previous day had gotten stuck in the branches, his metal cart sideways and tangled in the foliage. I’d practically forgotten the bull painted on it, but now I found it eerily similar to the ones apparently associated with both the people who beat me up and an international slaving terrorist gang. Hopefully, the dog had a better temperament.

“On the contrary, I rather like this city. My life has never been uneventful, believe me, I have stories. Eventful isn’t always good.” I crouched by the little fence around the bushes, trying to look less frightening to the poor animal. He whimpered and continued to struggle, his two good legs pawing wildly at branches and air alike. “Easy, boy.” The dog froze as I raised one hand and slowly rested it against his furry, scarred flank. I was pretty good with animals, except birds, birds inexplicably hated me, but even dogs known to bite most people generally loved me and no one really understood why. I guess I just had some kind of smell or body language that charmed most animals. This dog was no exception, it seemed. He whined and lay still, resting his head on the ground and letting me get his cart untangled. The whole area beyond the low fence was pretty filled with bushes, so I picked him up and set him back on the path, hoping he’d learn not to jump the fence again. With a grateful bark, the dog clattered away, cart bouncing down the steps as he nearly careened into the rest of our car-repair entourage. I picked a few leaves out of my splint.

“That’s kinda impressive,” Arcade remarked, leaving Daisy to argue unsupervised as we resumed walking, “Rex normally hates...well, most people.”

I shrugged, “I’m good with dogs. Wait, you know that dog, specifically?”

Now it was his turn to shrug, “I know his history, more or less. I’ve tried to catch him to take him to an animal shelter or something, but he’s never let me get near.”

“He seems really skittish,” Veronica broke in, “Has he always been like that?”

“He used to be a really nice dog. His owner was fairly nice as well, excluding some ego issues and involvement in some pretty shady dealings, it seems. Apparently, he found Rex down by the docks a few years back, stuck half in the water, cart-and-all. He took the dog in and no one ever showed up to claim him, but about a year ago, both of them vanished. They...it turned out that somebody killed his owner, which I guess isn’t too surprising, given the kind of business he dealt with, but Rex only resurfaced a few months ago, and he’s been skittish like that ever since.”

“Poor thing.” I considered the dog. ...I _did_ have a fairly big house...and I missed my family’s dogs... “I’ll see if I can catch him. Maybe he’d warm up to me and stop being so volatile.”

We all fell silent for a while, walking further down the stairs and Arcade stayed with us. I guess he’d grown tired of listening to Daisy and Gibson bicker about the finer details of automobile mechanics.

Veronica eventually broke the silence. “You said something earlier about how you’ve had an eventful life. Normally, I’d say you seem too young for that, but you’ve got a look that makes me believe you. Care to share those stories you mentioned?”

I shrugged. I tried not to show the sorrow I felt when I remembered the last time I’d been asked that question. Sometimes I really hated emotions. “Well...”

* * *

I didn’t miss the brief glimmer of sadness in Jack’s eyes, but I doubt Veronica saw it. I guess that was another thing I should try to ask him about later. But, as before, he glossed over it and launched into some story about getting lost in Beijing. As we reached the car with Veronica laughing wildly at the amusing and ridiculous outcome of his story— which involved a great deal of horribly mistranslated Chinese— Gibson, Daisy, and Raul caught up with us and Raul threw in a story of his own as they set to work. My car, it seemed, was so old, and had so much wrong with it that Raul had finished his tale before the four of them even found the problem. Jack struck up another annecdote, this time about getting stranded with his mother in Siberia when he was eight. He had to pause his retelling to avoid distracting them because it got so suspenseful. Around the time he concluded that account, Gibson announced that the spark plug was clogged at exactly the same moment that Daisy declared the battery dead. A moment of tangible disagreement followed the proclamations before Veronica suggested that it was probably both. As the most spry of the mechanics, she ran back to get the necessary replacements, pausing only to mutter to me, “Get a new car _fast_ , this won’t last long. And keep them from killing each other.”

More to prevent Daisy and Gibson from starting up again, I asked Jack for another story and Raul, apparently picking up on my intentions, closed the hood to listen, distracting Daisy and Gibson from the engine. Jack seemed to have been telling his less interesting stories to keep everyone focused, because this time he launched into a wild account of surviving a rough landing of a private jet in Africa and subsequently encountering various dangerous wildlife and other obstacles before getting picked up by a rather questionable group of men. The story would have been exciting if he’d told it like the average person, but he seemed to have recounted this particular adventure hundreds of times before and had thus perfected and memorized phrasing and timing. Everyone was so riveted that when Veronica returned, they refused to install the new parts until he finished. Damn, the man’s life really was eventful, maybe more eventful than mine, which was really saying something. I was starting to wonder in earnest if he didn’t just make these stories up off the top of his head by the time he finished.

Once he finished, the actual replacement of the battery and spark plug only took a few minutes, during which Daisy badgered Jack with questions about the plane, few of which he could answer. It did seem unlikely to me, come to think of it, that he would make up stories which so rarely portrayed him as a competent adult. In Beijing, he’d been nineteen, but he spoke almost no Chinese, and as a result the tale played out as a comedy with almost every situation directly caused by his own ineptitude. In Africa, when he had been younger, he had mostly described watching the adults brave the dangers and being rescued on several instances that his own misjudgments had gotten him in trouble. According to him, he’d come face-to-face with a lion through one such mistake. In fact, the only truly positive aspect showcased in those two stories had been his incredible ability to identify and spot wildlife, not that it had really done much good most of the time. Apparently, he’d spotted and subsequently been chased and attacked by an ostrich, recognized a pit viper after it had bitten their injured pilot, and spotted a massive crocodile in a river they had already decided not to cross. Truly, Jack had only seemed helpful in the Siberia story, where he and his mother had ultimately found shelter because a hunter took pity on a woman and eight-year-old wandering the frigid wilds. Jack mentioned something about the man having a son around his age, but he couldn’t speak Russian and the boy had known very little English, so most of their brief time together had been stares and confusion. Surely if he’d made these stories up he would have been a little more flattering, even _I_ would have tried not to seem quite so pathetic in such narratives.

Raul tested the car when the girls agreed they were done and closed the hood. It managed to start, although the engine shook with a horrible grinding sound that made all the mechanics wince. Raul turned it off and handed me back the keys.

“Boss, as much as I love fifteen-year-old cars, you might want to get something a little newer. Inside, this car looks the way these old bones feel.”

“Yeah, I probably should stop putting that off...” I hated dealing with car salesmen. Or most salespeople, for that matter. Or just most people in general. But this group seemed alright.

In her usual forceful way, Daisy ended up getting Jack and I to agree to spend some time with her and Gibson, which quickly became “play various card games and talk.” The first game, as it happened to be one that most people knew how to play, was poker, but Gibson and Daisy soon became so heated that I asked if there was an alternative. Admittedly, that decision was also partly fueled by the fact that I was horrible at poker, and Jack generally seemed to be deciding what to bet at random. The man was a force of chaos in all things.

Asking for an alternative prompted Gibson and Daisy to suggest several other games they both played and we landed on bridge when Jack jumped on that as a game he knew well. It seemed surprising. Usually, the only people who knew bridge were close to Daisy’s age, but maybe he’d spent a lot of time with older people. That seemed fairly disturbing, considering his job, so I tried not to think about it too much.

Bridge was a game of two pairs of people playing against each other, and Gibson suggested that Jack and I form one such team while she and Daisy comprised the other. Daisy seemed a bit more enthusiastic about their rivalry, so I suspected that Gibson did this so they wouldn’t have need to compete against each other in this game. I don’t think she fully realized the relationship between Jack and I, but then I wasn’t sure where we stood on that either. I rarely had good luck with card games and Jack, it seemed, had terrible luck in all things at the moment; neither of us managed even enough points to bid and Daisy and Gibson completely dominated the first five games. Jack turned out to be a better player than I expected, though he occasionally threw in an odd move, like the time he managed to fool Daisy into playing low, which let him take a trick with a seven. Between the two of us, we played as well as our pitiful cards would allow and managed to give the ladies a bit of a challenge, although we both knew we stood no real chance of winning. It was a casual enough game that neither of us really minded losing, the girls seemed to be the competitive ones. The conversation seemed more entertaining although it was all small talk. Even so, it got a bit dull, and I started hoping to at least get one decent hand between us. Fate apparently heard me, because just as I began to think that, Jack, sitting to the right of Gibson, who had dealt that hand, got one of the best hands I had ever seen, and I’d been playing for most of my life.

Bidding went clockwise. Gibson passed, I passed, and Daisy passed. That in itself generally meant that everyone had just slightly too little to bid, which, seeing that I had six points (a full three more than I’d previously gotten in any hand that night!) seemed fairly accurate. Jack blew that supposition completely out of the water when he opened three no trump. Two was generally a high opening bid. Three usually meant a preempt, or seven cards in a suit and few points, but that was only three of a suit, three no trump meant...massive point count. I hazarded a response, not really sure how to respond to that with only six points myself. Generally, at six points, one should probably pass, but this seemed like an unusual situation, especially when Gibson passed again. I ventured a tentative four no-trump from which he launched to seven no-trump, the highest bid in the game. Jeez, I barely opened my mouth, was he sure about this? As I found out, he was. Jack had been dealt a thirty-point hand that also held all four aces. My six points left Daisy with just a three point king and Gibson only had a jack, the last point of the deck’s full forty. As much as the girls had dominated us in all the previous hands, despite our best efforts, Jack easily won that hand and we made seven. I guess our luck had only showed up for one hand, because after that we lost terribly again, although we managed slightly more points in most of the later games. I even managed to open once, even if Daisy and Gibson ultimately won that hand. This was why I didn’t gamble. This was also, as it turned out, how Jack’s luck tended to work.

Growing up I remembered playing bridge with Daisy until around one in the morning, and she’d kept that tendency to forget about time when playing. Card games ranked a distant second to flying among her favorite things, but she still could play almost indefinitely. This time Gibson stopped her around eleven and went home. Daisy gave me another meaningful stare as Jack and I left and I knew I’d be hearing from her fairly soon, hopefully in a very long, lecturing phone call and not in person. I figured it was Jack’s age that bothered her, and I didn’t need another reason to feel conflicted about him. I’d sort through all those thoughts when I got home. Tomorrow.

* * *

Most of the houses on the stairs had some kind of lighting, either from curtained windows or little garden lamps, so the stairs were easy enough to navigate. I realized that I must have left the lights on in my new house, seeing the glowing windows there. I could have sworn that I’d turned them off before we left... I started to open the iron gate of my garden, but Arcade caught my arm. “Not before we get your prescription filled. I’m not letting you keep putting that off any longer.”

I grimaced. I really didn’t want to talk to him about that. “I...I’m...not fond of pain-killers.”

He frowned, keeping a gentle grip on my wrist, but pausing one step down from my garden gate. “Why?”

I hesitated. “I...I knew...” I leaned against the low fence, struggling to find words that weren’t so painful. I’d never actually put the memories into words before. It was too recent, the wound much too raw even after all these weeks. I shook my head. “I have bad memories of them.”

His expression softened. “You’re just full of secrets, aren’t you?” He stepped back up to the landing in front of my house and pulled me into a hug. He stood about half a foot taller than me, which left my head about level with his chest. Outside of my own family and one other person, I had never really known anyone so tall. It felt comforting, as if maybe I could let my guard down again, but I couldn’t trust myself to make that call just yet. Besides, most of the questions he’d been asking were too painful for me to let him know just yet. A lot had happened much too quickly in the past few months and I couldn’t risk putting it into words lest it break whatever sanity and hope I’d managed to rebuild in my life. But the older things, maybe I could tell him those. If he asked. He seemed like the kind of man who had painful memories of his own.

I stayed very quiet and still, trying not to think about all my painful secrets, but mulling them over anyway until he insisted, “I’m sorry, but you need to take something for that. I know your arm has to be hurting you more than you’ve shown, and even if you’re a masochist, you still need the antibiotics for that cut. And bandages.” He let go and stepped back. He must have figured out the gist of what I had been trying to say, because he added pointedly, “Even if you’re afraid that you’ll overdose, you should really take something for the pain. Even half doses, or Tylenol. I’d really recommend that you do, but you are your own person, after all, so...” He shrugged and let me decide.

As always, emotion warred with reason, and logic ended up packing the former back into the box in the corner where it had spent much of the past few months locked and forcibly ignored. It was stupid and irrational to refuse medicine because of something as idiotic as trauma. I had gotten over my fear of cars and I would conquer this fear as well. I nodded and followed him wordlessly to his Ford. I guess he accepted that I didn’t want to talk about it.

The DJs were less horny tonight, it seemed. The radio, which started up with the car, played a basic mix of well-known classic rock. I listened to almost anything, so I didn’t really care what kind of music it was, I just let it carry my thoughts away from my past. Distracted as I was, I didn’t notice for sure, but I think Arcade looked up a nearby pharmacy. He seemed to know the neighborhood, probably because of Daisy, but I don’t think he knew this side of the hill very well, and driving to the other side would have been tricky- I’d already realized that most roads avoided the top of this hill or crossed it in only one direction.

Between thinking about medicine and the lethal overdose I had witnessed and struggled not to remember, I found that my fear of cars had managed to come back just a little. I thought I’d gotten over it years ago, and for the most part I had, but every so often when I was already stressed or preoccupied it came back just a little. I felt the familiar chill in the pit of my stomach. I’d never gotten car sick and it wasn’t that kind of sensation. It was a deep-seated fear, even if it was fairly mild right now. I knew it was a phobia, like most of my deepest fears, like cold water and taking pain-killers, but it was a ghost of what it used to be. When the fear had started, I had clawed bloody scratches in upholstery and collapsed in shuddering heaps in the footwells of any car I’d been forced into. Now I just tensed and tightened my fingers around the arm rests until my knuckles paled. I’m not sure if Arcade noticed or not; he was driving and I was staring at the city around us and trying to convince myself that I was in a plane, where backwards wasn’t a possible direction. My fears were always specific; I didn’t fear death, I didn’t fear the things most people feared, the only time acknowledgment of risk transitioned into fear for me was when it became associated with a specific experience. Hence, I didn’t get nervous. My fears either didn’t exist or they were full blown phobias. Worry was different; I didn’t consider that fear. I worried about almost everything I considered important.

We got to a pharmacy and somehow happened to luck out with a parking spot right in front. I didn’t drive, but I knew city parking. It was the same almost everywhere; there was never a space nearby. Arcade gave me a long stare as we waited in line behind five other customers to pay and pick up my prescription. I’d opted for just the antibiotics and he’d managed to talk me into Tylenol. I disliked having any kind of painkiller in my house. I guess Arcade must have seen how tense I’d been in the car, or else he’d noticed that I’d rushed out as fast as I could once I was sure that he’d finished parking. He followed that stare with a statement when I didn’t take it as a question. “I know I need a new car, but it’s not like it’s going to explode. You don’t need to look quite so terrified...” His tone hovered somewhere between mildly offended and hurt. Or maybe joking. I had some trouble detecting sarcasm sometimes, and he seemed sarcastic a lot, not that I didn’t like that about him.

I shook my head, not really wanting to go into detail in public. “It’s not that.” Although, I supposed, I could probably tell him the basics without getting too vivid.

He eyed me quizzically, tilting his head to one side. Okay, that was adorable. I couldn’t _not_ tell him while he looked at me like that. “Is this another thing like with the painkillers?”

I nodded. “I was in a car accident. A bad one. I guess I’m mostly over it, but sometimes...” I guess he hadn’t expected even that much information, because he looked a bit surprised, but he said nothing. He stepped closer and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. I guess he was trying to comfort me, and I didn’t stop him, but it made me uncomfortably aware of the people around us as well as the fact that both he and I towered over them all. I was 6’3” and Arcade seemed a little over two meters tall while the next tallest person in the pharmacy was the clerk, who probably stood a little under six feet. We were giants. Visibly gay giants. I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that.

At least no one seemed to care, but I guess this was San Francisco. That openness had been part of the reason I’d picked this city over, say, Vegas. That was a whole different kind of openness, and the complete lack of water might have been jarring after my island home by the sea. Not that it was easy to look out over the Pacific and remember what I’d lost on the Atlantic coast. Or on the Thames. All that I’d lost. But it was no use dwelling on the past.

We got the antibiotics and pain-killers. He insisted on lending me some money because I still didn’t have my wallet or anything that had been with it. It wasn’t like I could practically turn him down, but I’d pay him back as soon as I actually had access to my accounts again. I guess it was lucky that I’d never used credit cards. Unlucky, perhaps, that I tried not to use debit either, but I’d probably have lost the same amount of money whether I’d stuck to cash or debit.

We got back into the car I was struggling not to think of as a deathtrap and headed to the stairs. Given that it was going on midnight on a monday, I didn’t really expect anyone to have taken the spot we’d vacated, and I managed to almost relax. It had been a short drive there and I expected a short drive back, particularly as the traffic thinned out with the lateness of the hour. I tried not to think about the accident because we were in a car, but at the same time, I wanted to plan out how I would explain that crash in more detail. I had only told one other person that story, and I didn’t like to recount it, but it was one of the few things he’d sort of asked that I could tell him. I wanted to open up to him, even if not entirely. I guess I recognized that I needed someone. I couldn’t live the rest of my life alone.

To avoid thinking about the accident, I considered this relationship, whatever it was. I’d never been good at categorizing such things. I’d never dated, at least not in the typical sense, and my previous relationship had been...unconventional. Ven had never really clarified how much I meant to him and I guess neither had I. It seemed hard to put some label on how close Arcade and I were, mutually speaking. I wasn’t even sure how attached I felt to him, let alone vice versa.

Lost in thought, my eyes focused vaguely out the windshield at the scattered pedestrians by the vehicles slowly traversing the gray pavement. A blonde man spoke nervously to a red-haired woman on the street corner. She looked like a tourist, if her sunglasses and “I heart New York” bag were anything to go by. He seemed like a local. He wore leather as if he was in some kind of gang, but he didn’t look the type.

Nearby, an old woman in a tattered but similar leather jacket spoke with a group that wore the same. Those looked almost like flight-suits. Maybe they were some kind of Air Force tour group.

A gaggle of kids in similar outfits played behind the old woman. It didn’t seem like anybody was really watching them closely, which, I suppose, was the first sign of immanent trouble. We waited at a slow red light across the street from the playing hoard. Parked cars masked the children from the traffic on the other side. It seemed that everyone was heading out of the city, probably to homes across one of the bridges, so that road was mostly empty and up a very steep hill like the one we sat stopped on. I felt that ice in my gut again as I saw a late-night tour bus bearing down on the intersection. The lights were on inside and the driver spoke into a microphone, no doubt sharing some anecdote about the sights they were passing. He wasn’t watching the road too closely. I guess some game on the sidewalk got out of hand because a teddy bear suddenly launched past the parked cars and landed near the double yellow lines. It drew the bus driver’s attention back to the road as a girl about ten years old rushed after it. He swerved. That first wave of panic washed over me like a bucket of ice water. Even if Arcade hadn’t noticed the bus when it first veered from that lane, the fact that I leap upward as much as my seatbelt would allow certainly would have told him that something was very wrong.

At the time, my thoughts left the moment, driven elsewhere by the situation and by my own painful memories, but I learned much later that Arcade had released the brake and let the car roll backward to collide with a parked hummer behind us, thus granting the few precious seconds necessary to avoid ten or so tons of fast approaching steel doom, thank you gravity.

I lived those frantic seconds falling backward in a very different vehicle, a classic Porsche that reeked of booze and dogs. There had been no dogs that time, just my father and I, and then the engine, and a similar wall of glass and steel bus, followed quickly by shards and blood, and then rock and ocean water, freezing cold, and pouring in until I rested half submerged and trapped, but perfectly able to breathe, and survey the fused metal, shattered windows, and mangled flesh and bone around me and to wait the four hours it had taken until help had arrived. Those four hours and the preceding five seconds repeated vividly in my mind in the three-second midnight accident.

* * *

It took a few seconds for my pounding heart to settle enough that I could think. The bus hadn’t missed us entirely. It had cleanly sheared off a portion of the front of my battered car and subsequently clipped the roof. I guess the one thing about the Focus that didn’t need to be replaced was the steel frame, lucky for us, because the brief impact somehow managed not to crumple my little car completely. Instead, the bus hit us and rolled, flattening the parked Hummer and subsequently leaving a wake of destruction down the hill behind us. I could already hear sirens. I should have been more worried about the certain death and serious injuries both to the passengers and to those in the tumbling bus’s path, but right now my brain was grasping at straws and trying to sort out rational thoughts from adrenaline and panic. I guess it was lucky that I tended to be fairly level headed in this kind of crisis.

Injuries. That was the first thing. I wanted to check Jack, but I’d been trained to check myself first. No serious pain. Nothing trapped. All limbs accounted for. The windshield had shattered completely and a little glass had managed to cut my arms and hands, but the wounds were shallow and superficial. I’d be fine. I looked at Jack.

Physically, Jack looked unharmed, but his entire body shook violently and his teeth chattered so wildly that I feared he might bite his tongue. His wide eyes stared unfocused through the nonexistent windshield, viewing some entirely different scene. When he’d mentioned a fear of cars, I’d suspected a normal fear, or maybe a phobia. This was neither. This was full-on PTSD.

“Jack?”

Jack didn’t hear me. Whatever flashback he was having, he wasn’t out of it, and I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to help him. Granted, I’d studied all medicine, but psychology had never been my forte. After another second or so, the clatter of his teeth lessened slightly and his eyes seemed to focus. He stared up the hill at the gathering crowd for a long moment before that lilac gaze flicked over to me. The panic in his expression faded, replaced by the kind of exhausted tension that followed such an adrenaline rush. His breathing, which had apparently stopped during his flashback, returned in shallow, shuddering gasps. He kept shaking, but now he seemed less...wired.

The first wave of sirens had ceased, deafeningly loud, at the downhill end of the accident, and I supposed that I could have taken him to the paramedics to have him looked at, but this was Jack. I barely stopped myself from thinking, “this was _my_ Jack.” They probably had better training and I knew it was irrational, looking back, but I wanted to do what I could for him myself, rather than turn him over to strangers.

Jack asked me something I couldn’t understand. As time had gone on, his accent had faded, but now it was back in force. At first, I’d actually thought that he’d spoken in Gaelic. Jack paused, fighting to slow his breathing. It was so shallow, I realized, that he might be about to faint. He forced one long, slow inhalation, struggling against the quivering of his body. I heard it in his breath that every fraction towards a lung-full willed his straining muscles to still. Over the sirens, shouting, and crying around us, I could have sworn that at that moment I could hear his heart pounding frantically against his ribs like a cornered rabbit. The largest blood vessels on his arms and hands rose in visibly twitching ridges along the skin. He managed one full breath and released in a wavering sigh broken intermittently by a dozen gasps that verged on hiccups of pain and terror. The seatbelt was probably digging into the bruise over his broken rib. That didn’t help. I pulled it off of him and rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Jack?”

He’d closed his eyes to focus on his quivering lungs, but he opened them again when I spoke to stare up at me. This time he managed to lessen his accent enough that I could grasp the words. “Are you...okay?”

I nodded. It was as if he needed nothing else. He slumped against me, still trembling, still loaded with more unfocused energy than a five year old on Christmas morning after ten pounds of candy and an expresso. I’d seen addicts shake less, and that bothered me. The way he’d sagged against me, his head rested against my chest, his face pressed against the quivering fists he had pulled towards his neck. His long legs lay half on the seat behind him, drawn up closer to the rest of his body. In some hope of comforting him, I slid my hand along his arm to cup his shaking fists even as my own adrenaline rush slowly ebbed back to some more normal level of frantic. My other hand rubbed his shoulder, forgetting the stitched knife wound under his shirt and numb to the faint heat of blood from the re-opened scab. His hands felt cold. Absently, I let my fingers explore the uncalloused softness of his skin and trace the sweat-slicked creases in his palms. I rubbed the quaking muscles of his rigid fingers until he slowly let his hands relax. His shudders worsened as I felt the rest of his body start to slacken. Those shivering hands shot forward to wrap my upper arm the way he had held it in his sleep last night. His head slid a little closer to my shoulder until his skull pressed painfully against my collarbone. His breathing became uneven again and I realized that he might be crying.

That long hair curtained his face, and I missed how red it looked until I tried to brush it back to see him. My hand slid free of the wet locks streaked with blood and looking down I saw my shirt stained crimson. He had a cut somewhere amid his mass of long and colorful hair. It didn’t take too long to find it. A scarlet seam traced the border between his face and his hairline, casting a long trail of steadily flowing blood past his ear and down his neck. I hadn’t noticed the stain among the red paint near the collar of his shirt.

I had a first aid kit in the footwell of the back seat on the driver’s side and I carefully eased him back to his side of the car to get it, moving with him. The width of the chair left me holding him mostly on my lap, his head still resting and bleeding on my chest. He muttered something into my shirt.

Still verging on frenzied by my own adrenaline rush and suspecting that he might be hallucinating, I answered with a calming but dismissive, “It’s alright, we’ll stop the bleeding and you’ll be fine.” Was this how my father’s last seconds had gone? I was stupid to have missed the injury. Why hadn’t I checked him more thoroughly? I should have seen the color change of his beautiful hair. Stupid, stupid.

Jack was insistant. “Gasoline...”

What? The word was specific enough to give me pause. Was he just imagining that he was at a gas station or something? No. I guess panic had shut down my sense of smell, because now that I thought about it, the whole car reeked of oil to the point that I felt light-headed now that I was paying attention to my nose. Of course fuel was leaking somewhere. Hell, the front half of the ancient Focus had just been ripped off and scattered down the hill among at least eighteen other cars and bodies. Why hadn’t I _realized_ that we needed to get out of the damn car? Stupid, stupid, stupid. I swore aloud and glanced at my door. The roof was about six inches further in than it should be. Wait. I ran a hand through my hair. More blood. God dammit. With the roof like that, the door looked visibly fused to the body of the car. I guess we were getting out the other side. Luckily, I had already taken over that seat. The passenger side door took some convincing and finally sprang open with a screech of protesting metal and a shattering of the cracked window. I guess everyone had thought that my beat-up Ford had just been another parked car because the paramedics, cops, and firefighters at the lower end of the hill hadn’t even looked up at us. Aside from the parked cars that I had ended up in line with, every other vehicle on the slope had slid into a nightmarish stew of smoldering steel, glass, and flesh. I tried not to look too closely.

Jack tried to stand, struggling against my efforts to carry him up to the street corner where the blonde man and red-head had relocated. His muscles were still shaking far too badly to even come close to holding his weight and he collapsed against me when I allowed him to try to stand on his own. I caught him and this time he let me lean him against the traffic light. His eyes looked out-of-focus again, so I didn’t try to get through to him with words. The crowd at this end of the street had focused on me and Jack and I think the blonde man was talking to me, but I didn’t hear him. I looked back at the car. If I was quick and very careful, I could grab the first aid kit before it caught fire. I had no other supplies handy and I guess my panicked brain couldn’t consider any alternatives. That plan, at least went off without a hitch.

* * *

I couldn’t manage to process why the smell of gasoline had seemed so important to warn of. My thoughts cleared very slowly, only managing to reach a hazy level of coherence while I leaned against the dirty cement. People were talking, some to each other and some to me, but my ears were still ringing and it was hard to hear them. I watched Arcade blearily, distracted by my pain but more by the memories and emotions awakened by the flashback. I felt very tired and realized I was probably bleeding a lot from a wound I couldn’t locate. The pain that numbed my nerves to everything else was the muscle ache I felt after most flashbacks. At least that part was over, although I expected a long duration of ache and stiffness for the next few days. That was how I remembered every similar accident, it was also what happened when sudden motion was halted.

Arcade returned with what seemed to be a massive repurposed tackle box. It was the size of the case that held my travel set of paints. He opened it and my watery eyes glimpsed the gleam of metal and glass. Medical instruments, I guessed, once he wiped something soft and white across my face. A gauze pad, I supposed. With alcohol, I amended, grimacing at the sting that barely managed to be known over the rest of my agony. He brushed my hair back and I studied his face, trying to keep my weary mind on something other than pain and bad memories.

I think Arcade must have felt as disjointed as this kind of adrenaline rush always made me feel, because he stared exclusively at what he was doing. I don’t think he realized that I was staring at him for a long while. Once my hair was out of the way, he cleaned the blood from my face and neck and then I felt the strange pulling of skin as he stitched a wound I hadn’t known I’d had. It was a sensation I must have felt before, although I couldn’t remember. Perhaps sometime after that first crash. The feeling did not bother me; any stabbing of the needle couldn’t get through the pain already filling my nerves. One side of his blonde hair looked red. My blood, or his? I tried to touch it, to feel for a wound, but my arm would only rise halfway. Finished with that cut, he caught my wrist and felt for other lacerations. There were others, of course. The windshield had shattered and flown into the car; we’d been lucky to have avoided much more serious injury. He had long sleeves, so most of the glass had slid harmlessly off his arms, but my splint-free arm was a red-slicked mesh of small cuts. The splint, perhaps ironically, had deflected the glass even better than his sleeves, and my thick tight jeans had kept my legs safe. I shivered as he checked the last wound and bandaged my arm, wrapping the whole thing rather than trying to patch each of the dense constellation of slits. His glasses were askew but unbroken.

My mind started to clear and the panic and shaky disorientation began to ebb. It seemed a little faster than I was used to after these episodes, but I supposed that it had been a long time since that accident. Maybe I was finally getting over it. I glanced over Arcade to see if there were any other wounds I could see, but there didn’t seem to be, so my gaze rose to his eyes. They were beautiful, a deep sea green like the bay and almost like the Atlantic. I stared into them silently, just content to look at him until all the pain and dizziness faded away.

* * *

I couldn’t find any other injuries that needed to be treated, so I sat down on the sidewalk. The adrenaline had ebbed enough that I found myself left with exhaustion and an emotional numbness. I looked over at Jack and found him staring at me. Somewhere behind me the gasoline caught fire and what remained of the massive wreck burst into flames, but I barely noticed. Jack didn’t seem to either. He reached out and straightened my glasses. I hadn’t realized how close they had come to falling off until he did that.

“Are you okay?” His accent had faded again, I guess it got stronger when he was stressed or when he had a flashback.

I felt my head. Now I could feel the wound. Probably a concussion. Definitely some bad bruising and a nasty lesion, maybe even a skull fracture. I should probably get that looked at, but I nodded anyway. “How are you feeling?”

He shrugged. And winced. “Ow. As good as I’m probably going to for a while. But I’ll be fine.” He paused and then double-checked, “Right?”

The people who had been trying to talk to me had stopped, distracted by the explosion down the hill, but now the blonde man looked back down at us and crouched.

“Are you two alright?” He spoke very slowly, and from that I guessed that he thought we’d been hallucinating or something. Jack and I started to nod in unison and both winced, clutching our injured skulls.

“You should probably go down to that ambulance and let them have a look at you. I don’t think they know anyone got hurt up at this end of the street.” He moved to help me but I stood before he could do so.

“Jack, do you think you can stand?” Now that my adrenaline had worn off, I wasn’t sure I could carry him, and I didn’t want to leave my first aid kit , if possible. It had taken a long time to put it together and I’d rather not have to replace everything. I was already going to need a new car. Not that money was my first concern, by any means, but with both of us fairly okay, I’d rather not lose more than I had to in this crash. I glanced back at the burning Ford. Well, at least we were alive... And there were worse places to be left without transportation. The African savanna, for one. Also Siberia. Jack had probably been stranded other places as well, if those stories had been true. At least there weren’t lions and ostriches in San Francisco.

I’d never actually been in a car crash before, and once the terror and chaos concluded, somehow it managed to become downright tedious. I suppose that was helpful for dealing with panicked victims of such an event, bore them to serenity. Victim. I was a victim now, I supposed, though it was a very strange idea. Or maybe not so strange after all.

The paramedics ultimately separated Jack and I because for some reason they felt compelled to examine us out of different ambulances (three sat among the other emergency vehicles, although only one could be seen from the top of the hill.) Since the first had arrived, all thirty ambulances had come and gone at least once. The hospital where I worked ran our own ambulance service in conjunction with the government’s, and I knew that together the city only had about forty such vehicles. I recognized almost all the paramedics involved. Most of them recognized me, which was a strange and not overly pleasant experience. I could tell that a lot of them had reached the point where they just shut down their emotions because of what they were dealing with. I was in a similar state. I tried not to pay too much attention to what they were doing around me or to the accident, but I still caught small tidbits of information. Thirty car pile-up, with a bus. A nearly full tour bus. Sixty-three people dead. Nine of them children. Twelve other adults in critical condition. One person had only sprained an ankle. He’d been a passenger in a truck that only got hit by the end of the bus, rather than crushed beneath it as it rolled. They still couldn’t remove the driver from that wreck, now that they’d put out the fire. A few people talked about their emergency response work at the ferry and the aircraft carrier. I had yet to hear anything about those beyond what the creepy reporter had said. It sounded bad, to say the least. What was this world coming to?

Because we had head injuries, they took me and Jack to the hospital for precautionary MRIs, as we had both (Jack told me later) expected them to do. Jack later summarized that he spent the time awkwardly fading into the background and somehow managing to be forgotten even by those tasked with tending to him. I, on the other hand, spent the next five or so hours trying to hurry things along and being thwarted both by distracted co-workers (who were now, I supposed, care-takers, in a way) and idiot interns who somehow failed to realize that I knew exactly what I was talking about when I suggested that the cuts on my hands really were too shallow to need stitches (as the doctor they called over later confirmed) and by overly social colleagues who peppered me with questions about what happened and how I was doing and such. Julie Farkas, who pretty much ran the hospital, showed up at some point in her typically hectic management of everything, seemed to be the only one who actually picked up on the fact that, concussed, exhausted, and by that point under the effects of a variety of powerful medications, really wasn’t in the mood to chat. She offered me time off and I said I probably wouldn’t need it. I only added probably because at the moment my head felt like my neighbors had gotten to it with their array of dangerous objects. I had yet to get a really good look at any of them, but at least one seemed to have a chainsaw and that seemed about right for the level of pain before the morphine kicked in. Having generally been on the other side of such things, it shocked me how adrenaline had numbed me. Now that I wasn’t frantic, more and more aches and stings started to show up. Thank god for morphine.

I would have stayed to help, I really wanted to. I kept seeing more stretchers rushing past, swarmed by paramedics and bearing ominously bloody patients. But I couldn’t trust my judgement and skill while not only concussed by heavily medicated. Hell, if I’d had a car, I wouldn’t have trusted myself to drive, and I was usually pretty reckless about that.

When I could finally complete the paperwork and talk to the waiting cops to leave, I found Jack curled up on a chair in the hallway near the closest elevator. His head had been bandaged over the cut I’d sown shut and the gauze wrapping his shredded arm had been changed, but otherwise he looked the same. He sat with his arms wrapped around his shins and his legs pulled up against his chest. His face lay buried in his knees and veiled by his hair, which was now stiff and dark with dried blood. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or asleep and no one seemed to notice him in the pandemonium of the hospital around us. I sat beside him, hoping to share his veil of apparent invisibility while I tried to get through to him. He needed a psych evaluation, but they’d either failed to realize that or he’d lied to person who’d checked him. I guess they had bigger fish to fry right now anyway. I figured he still wanted me to stay with him tonight, or at least for what was left of it, perhaps even more now that he’d been through all this, so I didn’t plan to leave him. Not that I would have left him in this state otherwise. Even if he was only asleep, he’d gone through a lot in the past several hours and with his luck, if I let him go home on his own he’d manage to get struck by lightning. My previous observation that the man was trouble had to be amended: Jack was disaster. But between that dazzling vitality in his lilac eyes and the deep sadness and secrecy that kept stirring up within him, even that knowledge failed to deter me. I felt like I could eventually be completely open with him, and I wanted that. But spending time with him had already come close to killing me and it hadn’t even been a day. And then there was that reporter.

I watched the silent rise and fall of his back and realized that he was asleep. I found myself smiling. The young man really did get over things fast, sometimes. Or else he was just too tired to stay afraid. I stood, intending to shake his shoulder and wake him because my muscles felt too exhausted to carry him again. I guess whatever power had kept Jack hidden on the chair didn’t work on everyone.

Julie passed by again and saw me as I shook Jack’s shoulder to wake him. I saw her frown and she gestured towards him with a clipboard. “Isn’t that the same guy you examined the other day after he was attacked?”

“Um, yes. Yes it is.” Please don’t draw any conclusions from that fact, Julie.

Jack stretched slowly and sleepily. He raised his head, noticing Julie before he noticed me, but saying nothing. Julie tilted her head, a puzzled gesture accentuated dramatically by her towering brown mohawk. She turned to Jack. “Are you feeling well enough to go home? I’m sure you want to rest, and those hospital seats can’t be comfortable enough for that.”

Apparently, fatigue and agony didn’t effect Jack’s demeanor, although they didn’t seem to do that yesterday either, come to think of it. He grinned wryly as he stood. “I don’t know, you might be underestimating my ability to sleep anywhere.” His knees started to buckle and he flung an arm over my shoulders, almost knocking me down in the process before my aching legs managed to balance the weight and his own regained their currently minimal strength. I could feel how much of his own weight he needed me to help with, and that scared me a little. I’d felt those legs a few hours ago and knew just how strong they should be. Was he okay, at least as okay as possible, given the circumstances?

Jack shifted to put on his best show of vitality and added, “I’m just tired and not used to pain killers. Thanks, if you’re one of the people who treated me, and if not, I guess, just thanks in general?” He looked around and I realized he didn’t actually seem to have any idea how to get back out to the city. Or, I suspected, to a waiting room. No wonder he’d ended up just sleeping in a hallway.

“You’re quite welcome. I hope you don’t have to come back anytime soon, but if you do, we’d love to help you. Please come back if anything seems wrong.” She turned to me and added, “And you can feel free to take time off, if you need to. You have a pretty bad concussion, I don’t want you working if you still need to rest, Arcade. You may want to at least take a half day tomorrow night...” She knew me well enough to know that my response wouldn’t have changed, so she left without waiting for an answer, but I saw her concerned frown become a smile as she walked away. Oh, yeah. Jack had his arm over my shoulders because he needed me to support his weight, but I’d wrapped a hand around his waist to try and hold him. Very low on his waist. And Jack clearly didn’t mind. Dammit, I was trying _not_ to make it obvious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song "James Dean" by the Eagles.   
> Sorry for the first paragraph, I feel like it just turned out bad but I couldn't get it to sound any better as much as I worked on it.   
> This chapter is mostly foreshadowing, setting up future plot events, and Jack's crazy luck. It also got way longer than I expected. The next chapter, to be titled "Hard Day's Night" will probably be fairly short. Also, sorry this got so dark, I had intended this work to be a lot happier than I Left My Heart In Navarro or the untitled work I've just started plotting out for after or maybe during this one.


	9. A Hard Day's Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: The profanity gets a bit...worse in this chapter. Be warned. Also Jack's depression may border on annoying. It will hopefully be toned down quickly. Also, sorry for how long this got, I thought it would be short. ^w^'  
> The title is from a Beatles song.

We took the elevator to the first floor and navigated our way to the lobby sticking to the corridors I knew less people used. Jack said nothing and I realized that he was on the verge of falling asleep, he was just fighting it. He looked pale and I suspected that he had a fair bit of blood loss, but just barely not enough to warrant a transfusion.   
I’d planned to just call a cab, but as it turned out a friend met us in the hospital lobby.   
“Back here again, dearie? I do hope those bad men didn’t find you again, pumpkin...”   
Lily had been on her way out as well, it seemed. I knew she liked to make her appointments at odd hours— probably due to her sociophobia— so I figured she was just leaving a check-up. The lobby was never deserted, and strange people were common particularly in San Francisco, but the woman still drew quite a few stares. At 7’6” she managed to tower over even me and Jack and she had the build of a tank. Muscles bulged across her broad and lean eighty-year-old frame, straining the fabric of her dainty white dress over her shoulders. She wore a little flower pin on one side of her collar and a floppy tan hat as well as sunglasses even though we were indoors. I’d once heard that her eyes were unusually sensitive to light, and knowing that purple eyes were only caused by partial albinism, I was surprised that Jack didn’t do the same. Heavy and filthy hiking boots covered Lily’s feet and added a few more inches to her towering height. I’d never actually treated her myself or read her file, but I suspected that muscle mass was due to some kind of steroid use because her voice had a deeper tone than that of most men. But she was still very kind, and I suppose everyone made some mistakes in their lives.   
She knew me, but she’d addressed Jack, and he shook his head, wincing at the motion. “Car accident.” He didn’t recognize her. He hadn’t actually been very conscious around her, now that I thought about it.   
“Jack, this is Lily Bowen. Lily was the one who found you and chased off the last of your attackers yesterday.”   
“Deary, I think your clock’s off a little; that was two days ago.”   
I sighed. Yeah, I guess it was close enough to be considered the next morning. She had a car, I realized, and as long as she took her medicine, she could drive.   
Before I could ask, Lily noticed that Jack wasn’t the only one injured. “Sweetie, you’re a little worse for the wear as well, aren’t you? Are you okay?”  
“Well, we’re leaving the hospital, so we’re both as okay as we’re going to be until everything heals up.” Again, I had planned to ask, but she beat me to it.   
“You shouldn’t be driving like that, pumpkin, I remember how hard it is to get home safely with a bump on the head. Let granny give you a ride.”   
I guess Jack had been thinking the same thing that I had, because we sighed in unison. “Thanks, Lily, that would be wonderful.” At this point, I just wanted to sleep and hopefully my head would stop pounding by the time I woke up. I didn’t really care if I was sleeping in my own crappy apartment or Jack’s nightmarish house as long as there was a bed.   
“Come on, pumpkins, granny will get you boys home safely.” She swept her arms forward and ushered us out to her car and neither of us cared to protest the way she treated us like children.   
Lily drove a blazingly yellow hummer with sunflowers painted on the sides and hood and a cluster of fresh daisies hanging from the rearview mirror. Jack and I were too out-of-it to anticipate separating so one of us could sit in the front seat, so we leaned on each other all the way there and ended up half asleep and strapped into the back seat with me in the middle and Jack behind Lily against the window. I don’t really remember the drive and neither does Jack. I’m pretty sure we both fell asleep after someone told Lily Jack’s address. Lily woke us when we got as close as we could. Looking down the hill towards the Bay, we could see a thin column of smoke from the wreck in the city. I tried not to dwell on how many had died around us there.   
With both of us so visibly falling asleep, Lily helped us up the stairs to Jack’s door. Somehow Jack still had the keys on him and when he dug them out, I heard the rattle of the prescription we’d picked up earlier that was now in his pocket. The lights were still on in the gloomy hallway.   
Lily made sure we weren’t about to fall over before heading back to her car. “Now don’t you think twice about calling your old grannie if you need anything, dearies.” I think she must have given us her phone number at some point, because I later found a barely legible series of numbers on the back of a mangled old grocery list in my pocket. It was my writing, I supposed when I found it, but I guess I had been so drugged and exhausted that when I discovered and read it later, I had a lot of trouble figuring out what it said. Jack had tried to write the same on the drug store receipt in his pocket, but his writing had gone from barely legible to completely hieroglyphic and he ultimately resorted to copying the number from me. Lily left and we closed and locked the door.   
I think we’d both aimed to reach the bed, but we ended up collapsing on Jack’s couch, the two of us tangled together and half on the floor. Between blood loss, heavy medication, and exhaustion, we fell into a deep sleep regardless of the uncomfortable position.   
* * *  
I woke up in the eerie orange glow of one of my living room lights. I knew immediately why I had awakened; my entire body felt like I’d served as the ball in a giant’s ping-pong world championship tournament. Muscles I hadn’t even known I had agonized me and nothing wanted to move. Had it really been this bad the last time something like this had happened? Somehow I’d managed to avoid most serious accidents in the past year, which I suppose should have warned me that this year would prove the most eventful of my entire life. I needed pain-killers. As much as I hated them, I felt exhausted, and this level of pain beat out even my truly Olympic ability to fall asleep.   
But getting up would be a problem. I lay on my couch with little memory of how I’d gotten there, one leg curled back beneath the piece of furniture and the other pulled up with my knee against the back of the sofa and my heel digging into my ass. I held Arcade’s ankle with my good arm. My splinted arm pressed against my chest with my fingers hooked into the collar of my shirt. My shirt which was stiff and itchy with dried blood, among other things. My aching head had sunk into the gap between the seat cushion and the arm and back of the couch, blinding me with black leather. I summoned enough strength to my neck to look around. Arcade clung to my curled leg, both arms wrapped around it and his head resting on my lower abdomen. He had one leg stretched behind him over the other arm of the sofa with his shoe against the wall. His other leg— the one I was gently holding the ankle of— draped my own, stretched awkwardly forward over my knee. The position could not be any more comfortable than my own, but just the fact that he could stretch his legs that far apart seemed impressive. I was too tired at the time to find that as alluring as I did when I remembered it later. At the time it only made me realize that he was probably in danger of falling of the couch. I wasn’t balanced there very well either, but I had the benefit of being farther back and pinned beneath him.   
I weakly shifted my legs, trying to wake him. He made a soft sound, almost a murmur, but didn’t wake. I guess he was really deeply asleep, and I was tired too, that’s how these things tended to work, but I needed medicine, and actually getting to a bed was probably a good idea. Or getting into more comfortable clothes. Water might be nice too, I realized, trying to speak and coughing from how dry I was. Scotland was wet, which I liked, and although this city was as well, I felt more prone to the kind of dried-out cough I developed in more arid areas.   
My coughing fit shook my body enough to rouse Arcade. “Hmm? What? Ow...” He twitched his left leg off my right and let it fall to the floor as he buried his face in my abdomen. I could tell from his grimace that he did that to endure a wave of pain. He probably felt as awful as I did. In retrospect I found it miraculous that I managed to be too tired to really notice that his chest rubbed my crotch as he breathed.   
I gave him a moment to get used to the pain and he looked blearily up at me. “Ugh...I hope you’re feeling better than I am. We brought my first aid kit in here somewhere, right?” He rubbed his injured head. I couldn’t tell how bad that wound was, but it had been bandaged and the cotton pad looked slightly bloody in places.   
I tried and failed to remember. I didn’t see it in this room. “Maybe... One of us should check by the door. And we probably feel equally awful, to be honest.” I usually hid my pain. It surprised me that I felt alright admitting it to him. I felt as if I could tell him about that first car accident as well, and maybe I would until the medications kicked in again and let us both sleep. That was a huge step for me. How did I feel as if I could trust him so completely when only a few months ago I had sworn that I could never trust again? This was ridiculous, the kind of idealistic bullshit found only in books. I shouldn’t allow myself to trust so quickly, not after everything I’d just been through.   
I didn’t want him to know that side of me, but on the other hand I did. I wanted him to know everything about me, but on the other hand I was terrified to tell him, terrified that he’d react the way pretty much everyone had before. Why was it that I found death almost comforting and yet I was absolutely terrified by the mere idea of being alone for the rest of what could be a very long life? Okay, admittedly my track record didn’t make a long life _likely_ , but still. I sighed. I let the old, familiar pain blot out the emotions, as usual.   
* * *  
Jack sighed. He seemed lost in thought, and he looked like he was hurting, even though he was hiding it. My body _really_ did not want to move, but I could feel myself sliding off the couch anyway and a pain-killer like the morphine I had in my kit would at least help me get back to sleep. There was a clock beneath the TV and from that as well as the grayish light through the tiny windows I estimated the last dose of such analgesics would have recently worn off. I managed to get moving and stand. I had to lean against the wall for a moment. Yup, this was definitely a concussion, my head was pounding and I felt incredibly dizzy. Morphine. Morphine and then sleep. And maybe a sip of water with that morphine. I don’t think I’d had anything to drink since that chinese dinner last night, and not having been asleep for most of that time, I was probably dehydrated. That didn’t help and it would likely make the muscle aches much worse. Right? My thoughts were about as foggy as the morning seemed to be.   
I stumbled into the hallway and found my first aid kit by the closet door. I sat on the carpet, took another dose and checked my injuries. I guess everything seemed to be healing as much as it would have by now. I mean, there wasn’t glass in me and nothing was bleeding, so it was a start. I left the kit where it was and went back towards the couch.   
I had hoped to suggest to Jack that we relocate to his bed rather than add to our aches and pains by sleeping draped across the couch. It was a big couch, and comfortable as couches went, but definitely not designed for two extremely tall guys over six feet tall and covered in injuries. Jack, however, seemed to have had a similar realization. He wasn’t on the couch when I returned and I quickly found him in his bedroom. He’d changed. He’d put on a set of dark green plaid pajamas. Somehow I kept forgetting that he was Scottish. Young, eccentric, and athletic somehow didn’t fit with the way I pictured Scottish people, which was rather terrible, now that I thought of it. It didn’t help that he kept losing his accent almost completely. The tartan pajamas changed this image a bit, even if he wore the shirt unbuttoned. They were fairly tight, so I figured he left it unbuttoned so it wouldn’t constrict the bandage and bruise over his ribs. I was too tired and in pain to care, at the time, that the pajamas flattered his figure, particularly as the top lay open exposing his muscular chest.   
Jack rested on his bed, his hair tied back and his beautiful eyes staring at the ceiling. I got a drink from one of the terrifyingly crimson sinks in his equally frightening bathroom and lay down beside him, starting to wish that I could actually change clothes. Whatever happened tomorrow, I had to at least stop at my apartment. This outfit was beginning to cling to my skin, or maybe that was just where the tape from the bandages stuck to it.   
Until the morphine really kicked in, sleep seemed out of the question so I looked over at Jack. Since I’d laid down beside him, he had turned to look at me. He hadn’t made the bed, so both of us lay on the sheet with all the other blankets at our feet and half off the bed. I’m not really sure either of us felt like bothering to pull them up.   
Jack stared for a long moment before letting out a deep sigh and looking back up to study the canopy over the bed. I hadn’t actually looked at it before, but now I saw that it had a detailed embroidered image of a herd of horses on a farm in what I guessed was Scotland, although it looked surprisingly like several parts of California. Some cattle and sheep grazed in other parts of the picture with a slightly panicked looking ram a little too close to the running horses. There was also a fox near a cluster of small birds in the foreground. It looked spectacular, if a bit stylized in places. I could appreciate it, even though I tended to prefer fairly realistic-looking art.   
I guess, at the time, I was too out-of-it to realize that Jack had sighed because he’d been planning to say something, so it came as a bit of a shock in the silent house when he suddenly spoke.   
“...Arcade...” He failed to find the right words and asked instead, “You feeling any better?”   
“Slightly.” I groaned a little and rolled onto my side to get a better look at him. “But the morphine hasn’t kicked in yet. You actually took some pain medicine, right?” He managed a grin. I’m not really sure what he found amusing about that, maybe just the fact that I cared when I was in pain as well.   
“This beat out my masochism threshold. Yes. A little.” He got that sad look again and he still seemed to have some thought that he wanted to voice but couldn’t put into words.   
“A little’s better than nothing.” I wanted to distract him from that sadness and hopefully give him some better way of leading in to whatever it was that he wanted to say, so I asked bluntly. “Not that I think you were lying, per say, but...those stories you told...did they all really happen like you said?”  
Now he laughed outright. I was starting to wonder if exhaustion and drugs somehow lightened his mood, but didn’t see how that could really be possible. If he was truthfully gloomy when he wasn’t drugged, in pain, or fatigued, how could he possibly feel better otherwise?   
“I didn’t make them up, if that’s what you’re asking. They really happened, although I admit I left out and modified a few details. Beijing, for instance. It wasn’t like I just stepped out the door and got myself lost. I was...I was looking for something. Not exactly something that I felt like I should mention around your...mother? Aunt?” He looked at me for clarification and I snorted.   
“Friend. Almost-mother, I suppose. Daisy’s been the only woman close to me after my mother died.” So much for lightening the mood. And his suggestion that he’d been looking for something led me to think illegal drugs or a brothel. Damn, conversations with Jack just didn’t stay cheery for long, did they? Two seconds in and we were already on death and vice.  
Jack nodded somberly. “Sorry. But, yeah, I felt that I should gloss over that part given my audience. I also ended up finding what I was looking for, or something close enough, I’m not sure everything translated very well. I wouldn’t have gotten lost if I hadn’t found it, and this was before the...why I don’t like pain-killers. My sense of direction is very good as long as I know where I started. With no frame of reference— as in that hospital— I can’t navigate my way out of a paper bag. I also can’t navigate when I’m drugged, hence Beijing.”   
“And Africa, and Siberia. You’ve been lost a lot of places, haven’t you?” He laughed again and smiled at me. Jeez, the man had a charming smile. I guess it looked better by its rarity. He hadn’t really smiled that much, but on the other hand, given what had been happening and the pain he’d been in, I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.   
“You don’t even know the half of it. Fate seems to have some kind of vendetta against my frame of reference.”   
“I’d love to hear more of your stories. Right now, if you want, considering I can’t get back to sleep until the morphine actually kicks in and I figure you’re probably feeling the same way...”   
There was that beautiful laugh again. It was almost melodious. “Yeah. I feel like I’ve been hit by a train. And I have been. But it was a pretty slow train, and I was on an ostrich at the time. I have a bad history with birds.”  
An ostrich? Was there anything he hadn’t done? “No offense, but you sound like you have a bad history with life. Do you normally face death multiple times every day?”  
He chuckled again. “I see what you mean. The last few months it’s been...it’s been more of a distant threat, I suppose, but now it’s making up for that. It’s usually more like once a year, or once a month. This has been ridiculous, even for me, I’m starting to think God has me on his hit list.”  
I shook my head. “How do you even manage to have your level of terrible luck? How have you even survived everything you’ve been through?”  
He shrugged. “Not a clue. I feel like I’m living in cartoon.”  
“Try action/horror movie. Form the sound of it, your life is too depressing to be a cartoon.”  
“There’s a fine line between comedy and tragedy.” He snorted. “And if my life was an action movie, there’d be more fancy cars and sex. Although there was the Porsche. Porsches.”  
I thought that was some reference to another of his travel stories and not one of his traumas. “So tell me about this Porsche...”  
He fell silent and I knew he was thinking. From the sudden hollow of his eyes, I realized my mistake.   
“Sorry. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”   
“I do.” He avoided eye contact, instead picking at the end of his splint. He sat up briefly to pull the mass of tangled blankets far enough onto the bed that he could easily reach it. He neither untangled them nor draped them over his bare feet and ankles. The pants of his pajamas were much too short, I realized off-handedly. “I...I want to tell you. And...and that is something...one of the few really personal things that...that I’m...ready to tell you. If you want. It’s not...not exactly a good memory, by any means, but if you really want to know why cars bother me so much...”   
* * *  
“I’d like to. If you’re willing to talk about it.” He hesitated and added awkwardly, “You have PTSD, just so you know.” I’d figured. I probably had PTSD about a couple things.   
“Well...” It was difficult to decide how to start. Maybe from the beginning. Maybe I should just summarize. That would probably be easier.   
* * *  
“I lived on an island.” I could tell by the way he lead into the story that it bothered him to talk about it, but I guess I understood that. Even if most of the time I felt the opposite way. I desperately wanted someone to talk to about my past but pretty much couldn’t risk telling anyone. Definately not Jack. Not yet. I really really _really_ wanted to trust him, but I couldn’t risk it, at least not until I knew him better.   
“We lived off the western coast, in the Atlantic. The...the castle sat to the eastern end of the island, but there were roads all around and it wasn’t so big that we couldn’t drive around it in a day, if we wanted.” He lived in a castle? Well, I guess it was Scotland, afterall, and he seemed to have money. He had probably lived with his parents at the time. God, he was young...  
“So...well...” He trailed off. I could almost see him gathering the words. I guess I spent more time on the other end of such conversations; I wasn’t sure how to act and being not only tired but medicated, my judgement was probably a little skewed. I didn’t know if anything I might say could help him, so I just let him think and listened.   
“My dad wasn’t really a great person.” Well that took a turn I hadn’t expected. “He started off as a really successful businessman of some kind— mother never talks about him, so I’m not exactly sure what he did and John Lachlan Maclean isn’t really a unique name, so I can’t just google him— but at some point he started drinking. I mean, it’s a pretty typical story and I guess it just ended in one of the better possible ways, all things considered. He got drunk one night while my mother was away on one of her usual business trips, stopped by, talked my aunts into letting him take me for a drive...” That could also go several different ways, but I suspected that I knew where it had ended up. Jack paused again. I saw him starting to tear up and he forced the emotion away. “...Like I said, he was drunk. He said something about going to the western end of the island to watch the sun set the way we had when I was even younger— I was about twelve when this happened— and he started to drive there. The island was always pretty remote, but there was usually a tour bus or two that would take a ferry over for the day and let people see the old ruins and cliffs and stuff. The roads were always pretty narrow and a lot of them were only one lane because there weren’t many people who used them. One road...that road ran along the coast, and it wound back and forth a lot. It wasn’t like the beaches here, where there’s sand and stuff, it was...a cliff. With rocks at the bottom and the waves just kind of washed over them.” He had to take another brief moment before he could continue. He finished the story in one breath and barely managed to control his accent enough that I understood him. “Dad drove me out there, there was a tour bus, on a blind turn, on the narrow road. Against his tiny classic Porsche. We broke the guard rail and got stuck on the rocks, half in the ocean, nobody found the accident for almost five hours, I was the only survivor.” Before I could let that sink in enough to have a response, he added one last detail, “I think my dad might have turned the wheel at the last second so the bus only hit the driver’s side, but I guess I’ll never know.”   
There was nothing I could say. I’d already known that I was way out of my depth of trauma control with him and this just confirmed it. “God, Jack...” The only thing I could even think to say would be to tell him what little I knew of my own father, and I wanted to. But that got into things I couldn’t tell him yet. I studied his face, searching for anything that might comfort him, but I found him relatively calm. He had that hollow look again. Maybe that was just what happened when his emotions got too deep for him to handle. He was so young. Jeez, why did anyone so young have so much to deal with?   
He’d been staring up at the horses again, not seeing them, but now those pale lavender eyes flicked over to me. “I’m okay.”  
“No, you’re not. Beleive me. I...I know the feeling.” I fiddled with a peeling bandage on my hand. The morphine was starting to kick in, and sleep came back like the tide, gnawing at my awareness. As much as I wanted to make sure he was emotionally alright, I doubted that I could stay awake for much longer. I didn’t need to, as it turned out. Without warning, Jack rolled over and pulled me into a hug, snuggling against my chest and burying his face in my shirt again. He moved so fast that I flinched, before I relaxed enough to hug him back. I think he might have been crying, but my feeble resistance to exhaustion gave out before I could check. I slept well into the afternoon.   
* * *  
Tylenol didn’t work as well as prescription analgesics, particularly at half doses, so my pain kept me awake another hour or so until boredom and being idle finally knocked me out. Although I could fall asleep almost anywhere, I rarely slept well, and even with all the adrenaline and exhaustion, that night was no exception. I woke often, starting awake from a nightmare each time and calming only once I recognized the warm arms around my back. I guess my body was more tired than I was because, unlike most nights, I stayed in the exact same position until the last two hours of sleep.   
That last dream was the only one I remembered when I woke.   
I was in Siberia, back in the memory of the time I’d gotten stranded there with my mother. The air was so cold it cut through my winter coat as if I wasn’t even wearing one. My eyes stung even when I closed them and the goosebumps over my shivering skin felt like knives. Scotland cold didn’t bother me. The negative thirty degree Celsius temperature of Northern Siberia in late December was another matter entirely. The sun never even crested the horizon this far north and the high wind of the current blizzard didn’t make things any more comfortable. The elevation left the air thin and made it even harder to walk. My nerves alternated between freezing and numb so I stumbled as I followed my mother through the blinding white that seemed to bombard us from every direction at once. We’d heard caribou and musk ox in the swirling storm and somehow managed to avoid them. Ten years old, I accepted the cold and hunger with the faith that my mother would get me out of it safely, as she always did and always had insisted on doing. I didn’t complain. I’d stopped complaining at an early age; it never did any good. Later I started to feel that as the only man left in my family, I had to be stoic. I still felt that way.   
But it had still been days since we’d gotten lost and amid the wild winter tundra we had found nothing to eat since then.   
The hunter had been out to catch small game for fur more than for food. He had loomed suddenly out of the storm, seeing us well before even my perfect mother had spotted him. He’d rested a hand on my shoulder before either of us had seen him and he’d said something in Russian, having to yell over the howling wind. My mother answered tersely and he continued in a more polite tone. She never told me what he’d said, but I like to believe that he asked why we were there and she just took it as a threat. She did that kind of thing when we were in danger, or at least she had when I’d been young. I think she got to know me too well for that as I grew up.   
After a screamed exchange in Russian, the two adults guided me to a cabin well hidden in the shadow of a cliff. I hadn’t realized at the time, but looking back I saw that my mother was much taller than this man. She had always been tall for a woman. She was taller than me even now. And he seemed a little short for a man, although wrapped in furs and coats it had been hard for my ten-year-old self to notice that. When I relived memories in my dreams (which happened quite often, actually) I generally felt aware that I was dreaming and that let me notice things I had missed the first time through. I hadn’t dreamed Siberia recently, so I noticed more than usual. For one thing, I realized abruptly that the tone I remembered the Russian hunter using had sounded almost...flirtatious, after the initial misunderstanding. At the time I’d been too young and too focused on the possibilities of heat and food to care. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that my ten-year younger sister looked nothing like my father.   
It had turned out that the hunter had lost his wife several years ago, or so my mother explained when I asked after we left, so he had lived alone with his son when they sheltered us. The cottage was warm and he washed our clothes while we ate. He gave my mother a coat and dress that had apparently belonged to his dead wife and I borrowed some of his son’s clothes. The boy and I had been nearly the same exact size and skinny build. He’d also managed to be almost as quiet as I was, although curiosity drove me to speak once I had some food in me and once I could manage to stop my teeth from chattering. With the door locked and the blizzard outside, the adults left us alone and I never thought where they went until now. When he took his hood down I had seen the father’s hair and face, but I couldn’t remember them clearly enough to place if they resembled my sister’s. She had my mother’s eyes, as I did, and I highly doubted that that would have been inherited from both parents, given that less than 1% of the world had our eye color.   
The father was an enigma in my memory, but I could picture the boy effortlessly. I guess I’d just begun to approach that point where straight kids started getting curious about the other gender, because I realized in retrospect that I had more interest in this boy than usual. He had grey eyes and a smooth, pale face. I remember that that had seemed odd to me. I’d heard that most people this far north were natives and it had seemed odd to find somebody so pale living up there. His hair had been curly and dark, maybe black or maybe just very dark brown like my mother’s. He wore it long and wild in that way that hair looked when it was left to grow out and no one bothered to cut it. In that bitter, Arctic cold, long hair had seemed practical.   
His voice had been so high-pitched that I had almost mistaken him for a girl and his hair hadn’t helped. He was the friendliest person I had ever met at the time. I can’t remember seeing that boy with a straight face. He seemed to find everything I did strange or amusing and we talked, as much as that awkward style of communication could be called talking, for hours by that wonderful fireplace until we both curled up and fell asleep. His father had let me pick out clothes from the boy’s battered handmade dresser and I’d picked a grey shirt that said `benign’. I think I had laughed at the word, so I’d had to explain to the other child why I found that so funny. His english wasn’t great and I had never had any skill with foreign languages, but somehow I think I had gotten my point across in a mix of charades, Latin, and German. German proved a common language, of sorts, although neither of us were fluent, and the rest of our chatter had proceeded in a mix of that and gestures. At some point the language barrier had started to amuse us and he’d tried to teach me some Russian just to keep us talking. We’d found common ground in an ability to draw and from there we’d sketched everything we could think of on the little hotel notepads I collected from all my travels. Sometimes he asked where one of them was from and I’d have to scour my terrible memory of maps for some rough representation of the locale. Japan was easy, as were Rome and Paris because apparently the boy’s father had taught him all kinds of things. Even the most obscure places I mentioned were destinations he could talk about once he understood me, and he usually knew more about them than I did. Ayer’s Rock, on the other hand, had been a problem. At the time I could draw animals and people, but never rocks or mountains. My attempt at the iconic landmark had produced an odd-looking lump that he’d mistaken for a bear, and then an elephant, and then the Titanic. At some point my increasingly absurd and futile efforts to make the sketch more recognizable had dissolved him into a fit of hysterical laughter. I remember that laugh quite vividly. Between the pitch of his voice and the way he laughed so hard that he couldn’t breathe, he sounded like a squeaky dog toy, and that got me giggling just as loudly. That conversation had fast devolved into a tickle fight until both our parents had to come in and settle us down in annoyance.   
The next morning I’d given him back the borrowed clothes and returned to my own newly cleaned ones. I’d given him a small stuffed fox I had brought with me and he had traded me a tiny carved stone horse. I had that horse on my desk and I moved it to sit beside me whenever I was writing or painting. I wish I knew what had become of that wonderfully nice Russian friend of mine.   
Now the dream broke from memory and I was in that cabin again as a child, but I was alone. In that way that dreams conveyed knowledge and need, I felt that everyone must be outside and I needed to go out and find them. I stood and ran for the door, opening it into a swirling void somewhere between snow and cloud. Something compelled me forward even as I tried to stop. A force like the momentum of a car crash hurtled me into the blizzard. The white faded but the cold remained and I felt myself falling into dry but familiar and freezing water. At first the Atlantic and then the Thames. Another memory. I felt and remembered my lungs straining, filled with water and aching for air, and then the hand reached into the current, followed by the mighty arms, and hauled me to a filthy slush-covered ledge beside the rushing river. I expected to see Venjamin’s dark skin and mane of densely curly black hair, as I had in the reality of the memory, but the dream revealed a much different face, shrouded in shadow and mysteries that had never existed on that grim winter night. This face was handsome with dark hair and the dream conveyed to me that this man was the boy from Siberia as an adult, and I was an adult in the dream as well, three years older than I had been when Venjamin had pulled me from that famous waterway.   
And then I was fading, as I had when I’d passed out from hypothermia on that night in London, but in the dream it was different, I was falling, rolling backwards as a bus crashed through the driver’s side of the Porsche and crumpled all the metal and glass and flesh to the right of me. And then I was really falling, falling off the massive red bed where I had jolted back onto my knees in my sleep and now found my legs tangled in the mess of blankets.   
Crack! Whump.  
I think I yelled at some point in that fall, and if not I probably groaned or whimpered when my skull hit the bookshelf behind me and then the carpet. I didn’t try to free my legs; I was too focused on holding my hands over my face because my head felt like it had just been smashed open. How was this more pain than all my broken bones? I didn’t really notice motion on the bed where the lower section of my legs was still stuck and it took me several long minutes to hear my continued whimpers over the ringing in my ears. “Owwww.....”   
My hands slowly slid from my face to drop limply to the carpet on either side of me. Doing that hurt my broken arm but it hardly twitched the needle compared to my head and back. My shoulders had hit the floor pretty hard and I guess that bothered my rib.   
I looked back up towards the bed and noticed Arcade staring down at me worriedly.   
* * *  
“I’m fine.” He struggled to untangle his legs and I tugged at the blankets in an effort to help him. He’d practically tied a knot around them; I had no idea how the man managed such a feat in his sleep. I wasn’t sure if I believed his insistence that he was fine. I’d been half awake when he sat up and fell and that collision had sounded pretty loud, even if I wasn’t sure what he’d hit. Or maybe that was just my own pounding head making everything sound loud. Everything still hurt, but I guess sleep had helped a bit. I could at least function, at the moment, although I was beginning to reconsider Julie’s offer of time off. If I felt this awful, maybe I really should just rest for a day.   
Jack pulled his legs free and struggled to his feet. He took three shaky steps toward the antique armchair by his desk and dropped, failing to reach the chair before he fell. He sat against the leg of that writing desk and rubbed his scalp, muttering something about balance.   
I frowned at him. “Dizzy?”   
“Probably just another concussion, maybe a skull fracture; I’ll be fine in a day or so.”  
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re very unobtrusive about injuries.” Granted, I’d seen all types, but this was probably the rarest. I dealt with a lot of patients screaming about tiny scrapes and cuts as if they’d lost an arm, and I saw many too out of it to notice actual severed limbs and the like. Hardly anyone took note of their injury and casually stood by with a remark of, “it’s okay, just broken bones, don’t mind me.” At least few said that without being sarcastic. Yet again I found myself wondering what the hell had made Jack such a strange person. He’d told me a bit now, but I had the feeling that there might be more to it. Like maybe he was the youngest of twenty kids or something. There had to be more than a vast library of bad experiences to cause him to downplay everything serious as if he didn’t matter. Although, maybe leading a life as “eventful” as his just led one to downplay major injuries because they weren’t, say, a lion attack or a plane crash. It was like the man had grown up in a series of disjointed Bond movies. The prostitute thing added to that; I doubt anyone but a prostitute got laid more than Bond would have. That reminded me of something he’d said last night, but I couldn’t recall what. Somehow it didn’t seem to quite fit for him to be a prostitute anymore, but I couldn’t figure out why. That was probably just my own healing concussion and skull fracture. Dammit, if dating Jack was going to involve this much injury, I don’t think my insurance could handle it, to say nothing about my aching body.   
Jack tried to stand again and gave up, dropping into his chair with a groan. “I’ve learned to fade into the background as much as possible.”   
“Why?” I was too tired to try and sneak the question in more subtly, so I was blunt. I sat up with a grimace. The morphine had worn off again and everything was pain, just more mild than yesterday.   
To my surprise, Jack answered, albeit vaguely. I guess he was too tired to be evasive. “If you knew my family, you’d understand. It’s better to get overlooked than to be the center of attention.”  
“Why?” Now I was just pushing my luck. I didn’t expect an answer. I got my phone and glasses and hoped he wouldn’t notice that I was sending a text. Lily would be asleep, I figured, and if not she’d already helped us out and I’d rather not take advantage of that. Daisy would have lectured me non-stop if I called her for a ride and most of my other really old friends would probably have questions and judgements. Luckily I had a few other friends in this area. Two of them were probably working now, given that it was mid-afternoon, but one worked much later at night.   
“Because if you’re the center of attention in my family everyone expects too much of you.” He was massaging his skull with his fingertips as he spoke, so I couldn’t see his face, but his weary tone conveyed an expression of torment.   
“I’m guessing you experienced that first hand?” I had the opposite problem. I held myself to huge standards because people generally didn’t seem to expect too much from me. Not that I was ever likely to meet my own lofty ideals, but I tried. I felt a little annoyed, frankly, that he seemed so pained about that. He actually had people who expected great things from him, not to say I was put down so much as belittled. Maybe he even had people who needed him. All of that was wonderful, as far as I could tell at the time, it was all stuff that I’d never had, and that made me more annoyed by his apparent anguish at it. He was being childish, I thought. This relationship was never going to work, I’d been right to think it was a bad idea, he was way too young. I had to just back off until my emotions worked that out as much as my reason already had.   
Jack made a soft grunt of affirmation rather than nod and hurt his head. He brushed his hair back to look at me and I saw blood on his hand. I also saw a worried curiosity to his gaze, but I ignored it. I sent the text I’d typed up and walked over to him with a sigh. “Let me look at your head. Where’d you hit it?”  
* * *  
Somehow I’d said something wrong, as always. I knew when I saw the resolute set of his jaw that something had pissed him off and I had no idea what. This always happened. Every single fucking time. With everyone. The only person I hadn’t run off like that was my sister, and I’d probably set her off when the rest of my family turned on me. It was inevitable. Why couldn’t I just find one person who wouldn’t get offended and leave me? Just one god damn person!   
I sat very still while he felt the back of my skull and shifted my hair to see the wound where the edge of the shelf had ripped my skin. I wanted him to press too hard or pull a hair or make the gash sting, but he was gentle. Or maybe I was just too numb to feel it. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted everything to hurt; I deserved it. I couldn’t do anything but make people hate me and maybe if I hurt enough it could finally make up for that. This was why I’d just wanted to be alone after I left my home.   
My own typically pathetic self-control astounded me when I somehow managed to maintain a blank stare. My gaze drifted over to my desk while he cleaned and examined the wound. I hadn’t had much to unpack so the massive antique mahogany writing desk only held a few items. I had some pens and pencils in one of the mugs my mother had made me years ago, most of them scavenged from hotels in exotic destinations. My mail sat unsorted in the center of the writing surface; it included a travel magazine, but the rest was all junk mail and people welcoming their new neighbor. I had a small pile of sketchbooks on one corner, most were full but the top few were newer. A goofy stuffed Nessie ogled me cutely from beside the pen mug. I kept him mostly because those wide glass eyes could sometimes make me smile, but he was also a reminder of home. My old home, I corrected angrily. Behind Nessie, I had a fur owl and a few other strange souvenirs from various destinations, all of them intended to hopefully cheer me up. I sought inspiration on the internet, in books, or in the past. The things I kept on my desk were either practical or intended to stave off the endless despair that came with such a hopeless, transient existence.   
But there was one more object on my desk. I reached over and grabbed it, holding the tiny thing between my palms almost as if I was praying. The dark stone stallion felt cold against my skin, and somehow the awful cold calmed me. A held it for a while, staying still while Arcade tended to my scalp.   
* * *  
He’d grabbed something off his desk, and I was curious, but I forced myself not to ask. It didn’t matter. He was a childish fool who’d probably made some stupid mistake and thrown away a perfect life. God damn it, I shouldn’t care! I’d already texted my friend and Jack had a skull fracture. I couldn’t live with myself if he ended up having internal bleeding and died, and knowing his idiocy, he’d never actually go to the hospital, so I’d make sure he got there and got treated, and then I’d leave. I’d go home and he’d walk or get a cab or something, I didn’t care. I’d go home, and go back to my normal life, and he’d go back to walking under ladders or turning tricks or whatever the hell he did when I wasn’t around, I didn’t care! He’d be gone, out of my life, and I wouldn’t have to deal with getting caught up in whatever vortex of eventfulness surrounded him! I. Did. Not. Care! And I’d never see him again.   
Okay, that last thought had been a bit more depressing than it should have been. That was a good thing. I didn’t need this level of chaos in my life, and I didn’t need to be with some immature white elephant of a boyfriend. I needed him out of my life and he clearly caused enough problems alone that he didn’t need me to tempt fate. I found plenty of trouble when left to my own devices, thank you very much.   
“There.” I sat back down on the bed once I finished bandaging his head. He sat very still, holding whatever it was that he had grabbed between both hands and resting his chin on his fingertips pensively. He had that haunted look again and I managed to pretend that I didn’t care. I watched him silently, running over a list of the few things I’d brought into his house and didn’t have on my person and waiting for a reply to my text. I got one. My phone was on silent, but the screen lit up when the message came in. He’d been bored and working on his car, although I only believed half of that statement. He was almost always “working” on his car. Some of it was probably genuine car work. I guess he had a nice car, but I didn’t really pay attention to cars and only planned to have him take me and Jack to the hospital. I’d wait until Jack was taken care of while I found Julie and asked off for the night. With my head pounding this much and all these conflicting emotions to sort out, I probably wouldn’t be much help as a doctor anyway. I’d call a cab to get back to my apartment and...and figure out from there who could get Jack home. I needed to talk to him anyway, all things considered, even though I had no idea how to word that gently. He seemed like the sort who’d freak out if I worded it badly. For all his nonchalance about physical pain, I got the sense that emotionally he was extremely fragile.   
“I’m taking you to the hospital. A friend of mine is going to give us a ride there.” He looked up and frowned a little. I doubted he’d seen me texting. “I’m going to get my stuff, you should probably change clothes.” I went downstairs, packed up my first aid kit, and put on my shoes and lab coat. Jack was just coming downstairs in a set of dark and clean tight jeans, a shirt with some illegibly faded band name, and a leather jacket. He looked like a teenager trying to seem tough. I found that ridiculous look made it easier for me to convince myself that he was way too young for me. I could tell that he realized something had changed about my attitude towards him. He paused at the foot of the stairs and watched me like some kind of lost puppy.   
“Don’t look at me like that.” He started to say something in reply, but my pocket lit up with another text message. “My friend’s here, come on.”   
As usual, I managed to feign some level of cheer in my expression. Jack, to my surprise, did the same, but only once we reached the car. He rubbed the back of his head. I was pretty sure the minimal painkillers that he had taken must have worn off by now and his injures over the past few days were much worse than mine. He looked like he needed a doctor, which I guess was good as it wouldn’t lead to the kind of awkward questions my friend would inevitably ask otherwise. He owed me a favor because I’d saved one of the hookers he managed from an overdose; he wasn’t likely to assume that an unseen medical problem was something innocent.   
Jack followed me down to the road. Most of the cars up here ranged from BMWs to Porsches, excluding Daisy’s beat-up pick-up, but my friend’s still stood out. He’d taken Jack’s spot for now in his gleaming BMW i8, a dramatically more flashy model than the others. I didn’t know much about cars, but I guess it was a nice one. I mainly noticed that he was listening to sexual-sounding classic rock. ZZ-Top, I think.   
The car had a backseat, narrow and difficult to get to though it was, and I was still self-sacrificing enough to slide in and take the back seat, letting Jack have the front. My friend greeted me and I muttered a response. We weren’t exactly close and I wasn’t in the best mood, though I suspect he just thought that I was tired or stressed. He knew I generally worked nights.  
* * *  
The car was still gorgeous, and I recognized it effortlessly from the other day, but I was too distracted to enjoy it as much as I might have under better circumstances. I was surprised that Arcade took the back seat, but too awkward to try and suggest otherwise. Besides, it was too late to stop him. The driver looked decent but not particularly hot. He wore a grey suit and tie. His brown hair had been parted and carefully styled. I think he had green eyes. “You must be James Garret.” I moved to shake his hand, surprising him by the remark.   
I think Arcade had planned to introduce him, because I caught a glimpse of a vaguely surprised look on his face— less shocked than Garret’s own expression— and he asked quietly, “Do you just know _everyone_ in this city?”  
I chuckled. I guess my mask of joy came back just as easily as it went. “I saw Veronica and Raul working on his car the other day.” Arcade sighed inexplicably.   
“Oh.” James smiled. He didn’t quite seem to pick up on the tension between me and Arcade. “Yeah, she’s a beauty. You seem cheerier than I expected for a guy with a head injury.”  
I wasn’t sure if he meant the car or Veronica. I shrugged. “I guess I’m just used to it. This is probably my third concussion in the past three days.”  
“Three for three, eh? Let’s hope it stops there.” He started to drive, carefully, babying the mighty car. The engine sounded like a cougar’s purr. This car was orgasmic. Okay, not quite, but it was still damn nice. And then we passed a bus on a hill. How long until we got to that hospital again?  
* * *  
Jack managed to seem so happy at first that I started to wonder if he had cared at all. And then we passed a bus. Even given his PTSD, there was no way he could go from smiling to hollow that quickly if his happiness hadn’t been a facade. I almost wished he _had_ just been playing me. It made it much harder to think rationally when he looked that vulnerable. Jack hopped out of the car unusually fast when we reached the hospital and I started to follow.   
“Sorry, car accident yesterday, and he has a bit of a fear of cars.”  
James nodded, looking much less confused now that I explained it. He grinned at me slyly. “Way to go, Arcade, finally starting to date half your age? He’s a catch, as far as I can tell.” Probably why your only steady relationship is with your car, I thought but didn’t say.   
Instead, I corrected, “We’re not exactly dating.” The conviction wasn’t there.   
“Uh-huh. Yeah. Like I haven’t heard _that_ a thousand times before. You’re with him, and not just as friends. I can tell. Good luck, man. Try not to hurt him any more.” He winked and I stared.   
“What? That wasn’t... I didn’t _concuss_ him, he fell out of bed!” I glanced at Jack, hoping he wasn’t hearing this. He wasn’t. He’d fidgeted awkwardly, not sure if he should wait for me or go check in and his vertigo had decided for him. He’d nearly fallen over and gone to find a chair.   
James narrowed his eyes. “And what were you _doing_ in bed, huh?” I eyed him sardonically. He raised his hands in surrender, “Hey, I know all types.” It takes one to know one, I thought, but again said nothing.   
“Look, it’s not like that. Really. He’s _way_ too young for me. We were just sleeping. Car accident injuries and sleep-inducing analgesics kinda kill the mood anyway.” I started to get out and noticed his contemplative stare. “He’s too young for me, so he’s _also_ too young for you. Don’t get involved with him. Besides, cars don’t survive around him and he can’t go a day without a hospital visit.”   
James raised an eyebrow. “Totally not involved, huh? And yet you’re that insistent that I don’t even _think_ about that hot ass?”  
I tried not to blush and probably failed. “Seriously. Not. Dating. _Ever._ And _don’t_ even think about it.” I headed for the hospital, but didn’t miss the skeptical look and laugh before he drove off.   
As I had expected, Julie eagerly gave me the day off when I asked. I guess I looked worse than I realized, because she sounded as if she was surprised that I only asked for _one_ day off. I found Jack looking lost by the elevator again and shepherded him back to the main lobby. Apparently, a cautionary MRI had determined that this was just yet another concussion and he’d been given another dose of morphine, leaving him more disoriented than he had already been from the pain. He still seemed awkward, but he said nothing, and I mean nothing. He made no small talk and seemed distracted by his own thoughts more-so than he tended to be. I called a cab and we waited out front, trying to ignore the smokers. It had started to rain again, although this was a light rain.   
Surprisingly perceptive, the cab driver said very little. He seemed to pick up on the awkward emotions between Jack and I. In the back of the cab, Jack stayed equally quiet, although he seemed confused when I told the driver my address rather than his. He seemed reluctant to say anything around the cab driver and he wasn’t so drugged as to be falling asleep. In fact, he got that subtle tension to his body as the cab drove through the busy streets. His PTSD was bothering him again. Part of me still felt more than a little annoyed with him, perhaps even angry, but another part saw that fear on his bandaged and bruised face and just wanted to comfort him. I put an arm around his shoulders, feeling him flinch at the touch, but said nothing and stared resolutely out my side of the cab. He wasn’t going to guilt me out of this or otherwise sway my decision. This could not happen. He was too young, and too traumatized, and simply too problematic for my already dangerous and depressing life. I just couldn’t handle him. As much as I wanted to.   
I lived in one of the bad parts of town, not quite where Jack had gotten mugged, but similar in atmosphere. The apartment complex beside the one where I lived had been condemned and now the building was so run down that sections of every floor had caved in and were visible through the massive holes in the walls. My neighbors seemed unusually quiet right now, which tended to worry me as it suggested they were going to do something big later. My own apartment looked decently nice, for the area, the building I lived in was painted off-white and better maintained than most around here. The elevator had been broken for years, but that seemed like a common problem and aside from the occasional stain, the stairs and entrance area were fairly clean. Jack stayed silent as I led him in and up the stairs. Inside, my apartment hovered between cultured and minimalist. Aside from three over-stuffed bookcases, my furniture was limited to a bed, two tables, four unused chairs, and an old sofa. I had a few carpets and about five framed prints, but even the small space managed to look severely under-furnished. I guess this was why I tended to move in with any serious boyfriends I managed to have rather than the other way around, but there hadn’t been many of those anyway. Come to think of it, most of the art I had had been gifted from the last of those, on his insistence that I needed _something_ so my apartment didn’t look like a monk’s cell.   
Jack didn’t comment on any of it, he just looked around silently, taking it in. I guess he traveled enough that nothing surprised him. I leaned against one plain white wall and steeled myself, trying to think of the best way to let him down easy. Jack gave up his scrutiny of the meager furnishings and stared at me. “What was it that I said?”  
He tried to hide his emotion, but his voice cracked as he spoke and he broke eye contact, moving to lean against the wall beside me and staring at a framed photograph of the Taj Mahal. I sighed running a hand through my hair and trying not to look at him. “Look...Jack, you’re just too young for me. _Way_ too young. Maybe if there were less years between us...” He frowned and I found those lilac eyes staring up at me. I knew he realized that couldn’t be the only reason. It wasn’t even the main reason, although it was also a good one. But if I got talking about that, I’d get heated, and he’d probably get upset in ways that would make me cave. I felt like if I yelled at him, he’d shatter, the man was just too emotionally fragile for me to deal with. “Jack, I know there are other reasons and I know you know that. This is just...this is just a bad idea all around, you have to see that, right?”   
Those eyes managed a tiny gleam that I took for hopefulness. “I see that there are many _potential_ problems, but such is life, and sedit qui timuit ne non succederet.” He who feared he would not succeed sat still. God damn, he was waxing philosophical in Latin. Was it that obvious that I loved philosophy? Maybe a relationship with him might not be so doomed after all.   
What was I thinking? The man was a child, or at least he was childish. He could cite philosophy all night long, but that wouldn’t change his age and immaturity. But he could be charming...   
I hesitated and he waited for an answer. He licked his lips a little. “I-It’s not just that...” I paused again to seek the right words. He watched me, clearly hanging on my explanation. Those wide, shining eyes both made him look more childlike and reminded me how fragile and widely experienced this man was. And then there were those glistening lips. This was going to be incredibly difficult.   
He edged closer. “Arcade,” he rested his head against my chest and looked up at me, “you’re wonderful. You’re the most intelligent and caring person I’ve ever met; I don’t know how I can go on without you.” My mouth instantly went dry. God damn it. This was not happening. He had not just completely reversed my decision. No way. I was resolute, I had made up my mind, I... I was seriously attracted to this man. This maddening, traumatized, jaw-droppingly charming and sexy man. Dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit...  
Jack kissed me, running the fingers of one hand through my hair to press me into the kiss and sliding the other hand along my lower back.   
Okay, that carefully planned conversation was completely out of my thoughts now. I returned the kiss, pulled him into a tight hug, and let lust and instinct take things from there.   
* * *  
I parked in the area and had a good vantage point before the cab arrived. The usually reliable methods of investigation had yielded nothing on the handsome doctor, which was a huge red flag, to use the colloquial phrase. The man had no history. All paths of research had led to nothing but well hidden dead-ends. Though, outwardly, he seemed the epitome of harmlessness, further investigation yielded such a complete blank that I knew without a doubt that he had to be hiding something big. With Caesar nearly ready to make his move and Lanius “chomping at the bit,” as I had heard people say, we could not risk leaving such a huge unknown uninvestigated, particularly when he was involved with another mystery, one who had proved much simpler to analyze. I would have been concerned had I learned that he was, for certain, some kind of government agent, or perhaps someone serving an organization more similar to the Legion, but this complete absence of identity seemed more dangerous. I suspected C.I.A. origin, top level as my methods generally found some trail of the less adept and authorized agents, but there were other possibilities. If he was not C.I.A., he was most likely some kind of war criminal, or a relative thereof, and that might even be more dangerous. Neither was predictable and both were often skilled, cautious, and well armed.   
Once the men were inside, I slunk towards the neighboring building. The occupants had forged an alliance of sorts with my organization, although I both hoped and suspected that Caesar would have them exterminated the moment they no longer served a purpose for us. They were disgusting people, calling themselves the Fiends. Under normal circumstances I avoided those with ties to the Legion while in public— these people even more so than any others— but as long as there remained a chance to gain intelligence about this doctor, I must seize every opportunity I discovered. I suspect that none of them even noticed the small and nondescript man who slunk into their lair and climbed the barely stable slopes of broken concrete which served as stairs. I mimicked the walk of those I had seen walking, perfectly capturing the subtle staggering shuffle so that my footsteps would be less distinct. I could easily walk in silence, but silence was much less effective if one was seen. Being seen, even peripherally, it was much better to take on the sounds of those familiar to one’s observers. They would mistake me for another Fiend, another feature of the filthy hovel in which they resided unless I did something to disturb them. I had found the same tactic mildly effective in animals, but more difficult when one was not the same general shape and species of the deceived.   
With the sun beginning to set, much of the Fiend residence was dark, easily masking my presence from my quarry. The third floor proved an excellent vantage point and I stood in the shadows there, aware of the drug-addled Fiends around me, but focused on the lit window across the way. The two men spoke a while before things took a different turn. As much as I tried to avoid watching such...instances, I frequently found myself unable to avoid accidental voyeurism in my line of work. On a few occasions it had even become vital, letting me blackmail key figures with evidence of such dalliances, but more often I simply found myself forced to observe them in case something occurred during the act to provide me with the information I sought. Or simply to ensure that I did not lose the trail of an evasive victim. This time I suspected that I would likely be able to find Arcade easily should I lose his trail now, but he seemed as if he might be willing to be open with Jack, and thus I could not look away and risk missing some critical confession of his aims and associations. It might also be valuable to lean how strongly the two men felt about each other, as either could be used to gain control over the other. And, if all else failed, knowing their preferences in such situations could also grant some— albeit very situational— influence over them. I already suspected that Jack Maclean found me attractive, and depending on what Caesar decided, a carefully manipulated sexual relationship could prove quite effective.   
Watching him with the doctor stirred no jealousy or similar emotion for me, but I did find it appealing. I was no virgin, but my...experiences had only been with Legion slave women and those sixteen tricky targets for which I had resorted to seduction in my work. In all sixteen cases, the individual had been slated for death for one reason or another and as such the suggestion of sex had only been needed to get the target alone and I had never been truly required to follow through. Several had been quite vile and I appreciated the ability to kill them instead and watch the lust and anticipation bleed from their eyes, replaced by horror, but quite a few had been very appealing to me. I had followed through on several occasions (before killing them, of course) and I would quite enjoy doing so with Jack, if such methods should prove applicable.   
As the events in the apartment began to move towards the bed, I became aware of eyes upon me. A large and hairy Fiend had begun to stare at me hungrily. I had heard rumors that many of them were not above cannibalism, like some of our other allies, so that stare seemed especially poignant as this man stirred a can of simmering stew over a small camping stove. “Yer really bold to come in here all casual-like, pretty boy...”  
Pretty. Boy. The man was treading on very fragile ice. I had heard similar talk in my youth in the Legion, but those men had quickly learned to leave me alone as I soon far outstripped their capabilities in combat. I did not wear my Legion clothing here; I had thought it better to blend in, however this man clearly did not recognize me. I recognized him. I had familiarized myself with all three of the Fiend’s main lieutenants. This man called himself Cook-Cook.   
I knew how he fought and I knew that I far outmatched him.   
I ignored him and continued to watch Jack and the doctor. Apparently, Cook-Cook took that as a grave insult, judging from the slew of foul names he called me as he stood. I saw him go for a leather belt rather than his flamethrower and knew what he planned. The Fiend likely suspected that my hands were simply in my pockets beneath the long outer raincoat I wore, but that assumption was incorrect. Beneath my raincoat, I gripped my machete and my favorite pistol. This idiot had ruined my reconnaissance, but it was still imperative that my quarry never realize I was here.   
I knew a great deal about Cook-Cook; I knew a great deal about almost everyone I might come in contact with. He owned several stuffed cattle, one of which he had such affection for that many people suspected he used it for disgusting purposes. I didn’t care one way or another, but I had noticed several scattered stuffed cows, one of which had been kept almost lovingly intact. The incredibly sharpened blade of my machete shredded it in an instant. I doubt Cook-Cook, drugged as he was, had the slightest chance to react before it was destroyed. His lower lip twitched, but I didn’t stay to study his reaction. I dove for the ramp of cement. I was surely out of sight from the apartment window before the man screamed in rage and grief. I had judged that the flamethrower would be more capable of causing chaos when wielded by a manic fiend; creating my own distraction to cover my escape would have been more difficult. I heard the startled Fiends around him shrieking as he set everything in his sight aflame. Already psychotic and loaded with hallucinogenic drugs, the man would burn it all indiscriminately. In other words, he created the perfect fiasco to mask my escape. And as this building abutted the partly wooden apartment complex and its painted siding, the fire would spread. I trusted that Jack and the doctor would have no trouble leaving the apartment well before the fire posed any real threat to them.   
Even so, I stayed nearby, hidden and silent on the fire escape of a building across the street. If a problem occurred, I could easily intervene.   
* * *  
Sudden light through the window was quickly followed by a fire alarm and then sprinklers. Jack and I both slumped in annoyance and swore in unison. Our phrase of choice perfectly suited our desires at that moment. Was fate actively trying to ensure that I didn’t get laid?  
* * *  
Was fate actively trying to ensure that I never got laid? This was ridiculous. But I smelled smoke and saw the flickering orange light through the window reflected back off the glass of a photo of a sequoia forest. There was really a fire. I guess we had to stop.   
He’d only just gotten my pants off; we’d only been doing this for a few minutes. I guess that was a good thing, because otherwise it would have taken much longer to get out and avoid being walked in on by firefighters. Right now, if I’d been with someone a bit less safety conscious, I would have just kept going despite the flames. Yes, I had trouble with my priorities in life.   
He sighed and took a grudging moment to make himself presentable while I just lay there and rubbed my temples in annoyance. Somewhere someone revved a chainsaw and I empathized. If I’d been just a little more crazy, heads would roll for this...   
He looked back and raised an eyebrow when he saw that I hadn’t moved. “Are you com— er— following me? There is an actual fire, you know...” He nodded to the window and then frowned at it.   
“Just cursing whatever gods hate me so fervently.” I pulled my pants up, dressing in a fraction of a second. I was good at that.   
* * *  
I tore my gaze from the chaos of practically naked burning drug addicts battling with a wide array of weapons to glance at Jack with the intention of actually leaving with him. He was already dressed again. God damn, how’d he do that so fast? Oh, yeah, prostitute. Probably. Had to be. Definitely a prostitute. Right?   
Oh yeah, the building was still on fire. Now I was starting to smell the smoke indoors. We headed downstairs as sirens fast approached.   
The sun had set and the neighborhood was bad enough that people actually fled danger rather than watch and take videos on their phones. Jack and I crossed the street and waited on the sidewalk, silently joining the handful of other people who shared the apartment complex with me. Most of them were more visibly down on their luck and they said nothing. They probably couldn’t afford a new apartment, some of them probably couldn’t replace anything they might lose if the fire kept raging. Thankfully for all of us, fire engines and nearly a dozen cop cars swooped in within ten minutes. Another three and the fire was out and some of the cops approached us to ask questions.   
Oh, great, here go another three hours, I thought as they drew nearer. They liked to take forever about questioning witnesses, especially in this neighborhood. And I didn’t have the “benefit” of a fresh injury to get them to let me go. Jack sighed, conveying the same general attitude, though he looked worse. Both of us got questioned by women officers, which made things worse in my case and probably better in his. The cops apparently didn’t get that we were...involved. Again, I wasn’t exactly sure what to call us yet. Dating? Maybe? Both cops seemed very interested in us. The one talking to me sounded pretty inexperienced and she showed her attraction by endeavoring to prolong our discussion when I really just wanted to figure out what I was going to do with Jack and hopefully ask him where exactly we stood. That voice of reason and caution came back in my mind, insisting that Jack was a terrible idea and pursuing him was just going to end in disaster. On the other hand...   
I sighed, baffling the officer and had to ask her to repeat her question.   
The woman who questioned Jack seemed to be fairly high-ranking as cops went. I didn’t really understand their system, but she sounded commanding. She talked to Jack switching between a powerful series of orders and a more tender, comforting tone. I’m not sure why, but something about her just rubbed me the wrong way, like the drunks who came into the hospital once a week faking an illness just to hit on me. Jack just seemed confused by her polarized badgering. He answered simply, but kept shooting me awkward glances when she looked away. I still wasn’t sure what Officer Giles thought of him when she abruptly switched to her coddling tone and told him that she had no more questions. Through the course of the questioning he’d mentioned that he lived across town and he’d stopped by to talk to me while I’d said something similarly vague in my own series of answers, so it only surprised me mildly when Giles offered to give him a ride on her way back to the station.   
Jack gave me a look as if asking permission. The officer talking to me had lost her train of thought entirely and was now rambling about her pet cats, so I really hadn’t been listening to her. I was paying attention to Jack. I shrugged at him, halting the cop who had been speaking to me, “Sure? I was just thinking I’d call you a cab. It’s not like you need my permission...” On the other hand, that seemed vaguely romantic and adorable. But also really childlike. With the sprinklers going and everything, actually getting back to what we had been doing seemed impossible, and I no longer had the faintest idea whether or not I planned to pursue him, so there was no real point for him to stay here. I thought he would pick up on that himself.   
Indignant at having been so blatantly ignored, the cop questioning me took her time even more deliberately and I ended up stuck on the curb for another hour, at least. After that she not only asked me on a date but tried to slip me her phone number twice. I didn’t really think I was overly subtle about my sexuality (more subtle about who I was actually in...in what might be a relationship with? I supposed?) That said, I had to finally tell her outright that I was only interested in men, which she took as a personal affront and slapped me before storming off. Damn it. Why did the crazy ones always like me?   
* * *  
Officer Giles had to rank high on my list of craziest drivers I’d ridden with, beaten only by my uncle and cousins, all of whom had gotten into no less than fifteen accidents each. With the morphine I found my phobia a bit more controlled than normal, but I still ended up shaking in the seat by the time we pulled into the spot down the hill from my house, my muscles locking my limbs into place against the upholstery.   
“Kid, luck isn’t with you. You’ve got a really distinct name and I already heard that you were in both that awful accident yesterday and the gang-related brawl to the south. Why don’t you let me look after you?” She started to run a hand up my knee and the focus of my anxiety swiveled like a high-backed leather office chair. There were people I would have been totally fine with in this situation, Arcade for one, also that sexy journalist, but definitely not this woman. She was a woman, for starters, that alone was a gigantic turn-off for me.   
I balked visibly and I guess she picked up on the revulsion in my eyes. “...or I could always fake evidence to get you convicted on something. Maybe say that you tried to rape me after I selflessly drove you home?”  
Fuck. Come on, Jack, think fast, you can do this. I went with the first tactic that came to mind. I smiled, feigning superiority. “You wouldn’t have evidence for that. And do you really want to deal with the kind of lawyers my mother, C.E.O. of Poseidon Energy, can hire? Not to mention start an international incident? You realize I’m still a Scottish citizen, right? And I already haven’t had much reason to be impressed by the security of this country?” I dropped into an accent as I continued and left out that minor detail that “C.E.O.” didn’t stand for Chief Executive Officer, in this case, or the fact that my mother would never pay for my lawyer anymore.   
Giles floundered and I could almost see her struggling to remember the identity of the head of the massive power company. She gave up and I saw the fear and hatred in her eyes. “Get out.”  
I bowed slightly, trying not to push my luck too much, but seriously enjoying this. “Thank you kindly.” I trotted for the stairs to my house, noting the way she didn’t drive away immediately. I got that creeping tingle that I’d just made a huge mistake, but it was too late to change what I’d said. FML.


	10. Smooth Criminal

My dose of morphine wore off soon afterwards and by then I felt too awful to risk taking anything. My whole body ached and I had enough experience with PTSD and collisions to know how I best dealt with such things. I drew a painfully hot bath in the Red Death bathroom, as I had dubbed it, and tried to relax. Steam filled the room and coated the dark window as I let my sore body soak. I chose to revel in the fact that I had a house to myself for once and left my clothes and robe in my bedroom rather than keep them in the bathroom to avoid being nude anywhere else. I brought only my music player, my speakers, and the tiny stone stallion with me into the bath. I’d set the MP3 player to a playlist of the music that best fit my mood. Gorillaz, Coldplay, and Avenged Sevenfold formed much of my music collection, so the playlist could go on without repeating for nearly twelve hours. The bathtub, to my relief, had been built sufficiently long that I could actually lie in it without having half my legs sticking out.   
Pain and apathy had overcome my inability to be idle, so I thought and studied the carved horse for hours, pouring over everything that had happened in the past six months. Mainly, I found myself berating my actions a few hours ago. I knew that I could manipulate people really well, if I wanted to, and I had done it often in school. The talent served me well, even if it was more instinct than planning. There had, admittedly, been several instances where I acted instinctively to drive someone to serve my own goals, but I did everything that I could to avoid manipulating those I cared about. It was a matter of honor, now more than ever, now that I had been on the other side of such deceptions. I tried to “play” only the people who gave me reason to hate them. I had played my homophobic ex-roommate for those reasons, as well as many others. I never said I wasn’t vindictive. I never claimed to be moral, either. But I didn’t use the people I liked in that way. Every time that I had without meaning to haunted me, even when it had been something as minor as the time when, as a child, I pretended to feel sick so I could sleep in on a school day. This was a lot worse. I had intentionally distracted Arcade from whatever he’d been trying to say and told him the things that I felt he would want to hear just because I was afraid that I couldn’t handle it if he even told me that he wouldn’t be able to see me again for a few weeks.   
I needed someone, I knew that much, but I didn’t know yet if I needed that companion so desperately that even a month on my own would break me. I did know that I couldn’t handle another death of anyone else that I cared about, I couldn’t handle another permanent loss like that, not until I could find some way to put all the shattered pieces of my emotions back together, to become some kind of stable human being again. I don’t even know how well I could handle a relationship at all right now, but I needed _something_. I needed someone. Anyone.   
I don’t know, looking back, how much of what I said I meant. I believed the philosophy, that was why sedit qui timuit ne non succederet happened to be one of the few Latin phrases I had memorized. As far as the rest went...I wasn’t sure. He was wonderful. He was very caring. He seemed intelligent, but I didn’t really know him well enough to be sure about that. I would probably be fine without him, as long as I had someone. It didn’t matter who, but...I did want it to be him. He seemed caring. He seemed sincere. He seemed like the kind of man who had no secrets. I really needed that right now. I don’t know if I would always need that, or even if I would want it when and if my shattered self finally recovered.   
But there was also that journalist. Now he seemed full of secrets, but the way Arcade had left... Arcade was smart. My deception wouldn’t last very long. He would see through it and come to his senses. And I would never hear from him again, but perhaps it was better that way. I had bought myself the time I needed to avoid that revelation at the time and keep myself whole long enough to keep it together a little longer. Maybe the journalist would be better. Maybe I could contact him somehow. With my luck, something bad would happen to me soon enough, maybe he’d come interview me again. Hopefully.   
The tiny horse gleamed wetly in the overly bright glow of the unshaded lightbulbs. I rubbed my thumb over the smooth rock idly. If I could find that Russian boy, I would have probably looked him up too. But he was probably straight anyway. Or taken. Or dead. Most of the best ones tended to be.   
I always go for smart men. Arcade was not only brilliant, but a doctor, two of my main turn-ons completely covered in that sentence and besides, he was hot and seemed into me. Venjamin had been a medical student, top of his class, when he wasn’t too focused on other things. Now this new guy, this reporter, clearly ingenious as well and, even though he wasn’t a doctor, he had an air to him that made me shiver. It was like talking to Stephen King. What horrors lurked in that mind? And, if I really lucked out, would he let me see them?   
Maybe if I went into the relationship knowing that he would always have terrible secrets, they would never turn against me. He was dangerous, that much was obvious. The reporter, for all his innocuous looks, was the deadliest man I had ever knowingly met. I knew instinctively that he would not hesitate to kill me if the mood struck him. But maybe that didn’t matter. Lately, I felt that I would rather be dead than broken hearted. I’m not sure how much hold life still had on me.   
That thought made me want to paint, but my aching muscles wouldn’t be able to hold a brush steady today. Instead I considered ideas for my next novel, working in a mix of my fantasies and my recent reality. This one would probably be crap, but it was something. And I had thought that I’d be awful at writing from the start.   
After several hours, I found myself contemplating a character based on that journalist and I finally recalled his name. Todd Acerbi. Acerbi was “cutting” or “sharp”, I knew that much. It was the latin root of the word “acerbic,” word roots were one of my many strange hobbies. And Todd made me think of Sweeney Todd. It meant “fox” now that I remembered it. Sharp Fox. Now there was a lovely name.   
A lovely name for a lovely man, I thought, and my mind wandered from the name, picturing the man. That gorgeous suit, those pale eyes, high-cheekbones... He had that striking fedora that hid his hair. I found myself picturing him with slightly long white-blonde wavy locks that couldn’t possibly be hidden under that hat. That was the fox I would write, but I wondered what his real hair color happened to be. As fate would have it, I was about to find out.   
The painting of the charging bull slid inward silently, that thick and ornate gold-painted frame sliding above the red tile floor and completely concealing the small and oddly high-set door behind it. Even in pain, I found myself unexpectedly alert to bathroom invasions— having shared bathrooms for my entire life and having spent much of that life surrounded by either female family members or homophobic roommates my massive libido had taught me to lock doors and always be prepared for intrusions. That hadn’t exactly worked all the time, but for the frequency of close-calls, getting caught only three times proved to me that I was good at hiding such things. I was generally good at hiding most things, which was probably the only reason I was even _alive_ at the moment.   
This time, however, I had no chance to hide anything, so I simply stared and lay very still as the man I knew as Todd Acerbi slunk in through the painting. He wore a different suit, a dark gray one with a darker shirt and no tie. No hat either, I realized. His short-cut hair was pitch black. He wore no shoes, but the fact that his feet seemed dry suggested that he’d taken them off sometime after entering my home. I saw a long and dark black and white hallway behind him hung with fancy frames, each lit as if in a gallery, but I couldn’t see shoes on the marble floor or the red runner that vanished into the shadows.   
I had showered before filling the tub to soak, so it wasn’t as if the completely placid water had any bubbles to hide me and I felt painfully aware of that. I could feel a blush creeping into my face. A thousand thoughts floated through my brain ranging from “Like what you see?” to “Can’t you even knock?” He was terrifying, and dangerous, and he could clearly get into my house whenever he felt like it, but he was also damn sexy and right now I was naked, which made that seem even more important. What the hell should I say?  
Todd apparently expected my stare of blank surprise, then again, I guess one isn’t usually expected when one enters an occupied bathroom through a secret door. He seemed mildly amused, but that constantly veiled expression never revealed much. “Your experience here continues to be interesting; I hear that you concussed yourself again, witnessed a large fire, and managed to make an enemy of one of the higher-ranking police officers in the area. Quite a lot to accomplish in one day, did you intend to cause such trouble here?”  
I couldn’t really tell if he was joking or not, so I feigned calm as much as possible and laughed, “Not really, trouble just comes to me wherever I go, I mean, you just waltzed in like you own the place. I guess it’s a good thing that I still haven’t found a limit on the amount of trouble I can handle.” That line had sounded much clearer in my head. Damn. I’d have to work out a better way of flirting with him.   
He tilted his head slightly and raised an eyebrow, the ghost of a grin creeping onto his face. “Are you flirting with me?”   
That grin could fall anywhere between “let’s shag” and “I will brutally kill you for saying that.” I prayed it was the former and nodded. My heart had been pounding since he first opened the painting and now I could feel blood starting to rush places. I focused all my minimal self-control, desperate to avoid that just in case a badly timed boner might drive him to end my life. Granted, I wasn’t too attached to life, but basic self-preservation instinct liked to make me forget that when I wasn’t on drugs or much more depressed than I was now. I guess I’d managed to recover a little from a few hours ago. Thinking about writing and hot guys generally improved such moods.   
For a painfully long moment, he didn’t react, and then that smile grew to an almost wolfish grin. “I highly doubt you can handle me.”   
In perhaps the most dangerous decision I have ever made, I planned to challenge, “Want to bet?” but my body preempted my reply. Given the completely clear water, the twitch of my cock could hardly be more visible. God damn it, self control! Even if I had wanted to hide my attraction, I doubt my dick would have let me. Sometimes I really felt that this libido would one day get me killed.   
I wasn’t entirely sure that it hadn’t just done so. In a matter of seconds, Todd stepped to the side of the tub, removed the stopper in the drain, and hauled me to my feet with one hand yanking my long hair to lift me and the other steering me by my hardening cock. The whole motion hurt like hell, but I found myself in a particularly masochistic mood after such dark contemplations and one of those hands ensured that I really did not care if he was hurting me.   
He kept one hand on my erection but released my hair, letting it slap the stitched-up knife wound on my shoulder hard enough to make me flinch. There followed the most ludicrously fast one-handed disrobing I have ever seen.   
I stared at him. He looked even better without clothes on. I didn’t think to glance beyond his chest because he looked into my eyes and those eerily cold pupils snapped my gaze back to his face. “Damn, where’d you learn to strip so fast?”  
“I have found it necessary to change clothing very quickly in my line of work.”  
“What are you, some kind of superhero C.I.A. agent?”  
That grin, which had vanished, returned briefly. “What do you think I am?”  
I thought for a moment, vaguely aware that he was stroking himself to get hard. “Russian spy.”  
Stopping mid-motion, he gave me a strange look. “Why?”  
“Because something about you seems Russian to me.” I shrugged, “I don’t know why.” Maybe it was those gray eyes reminding me of that kid I’d met in Siberia. I realized abruptly that I still had the stone horse in my hand, concealed in a gentle fist. Hopefully I wouldn’t need that hand.   
I guess Todd let that statement go, because he said nothing and after a few seconds, he abruptly turned on the shower. From careful experiments preceding my previous shower, I had learned that the water got hot very fast, but I also had a bad habit of turning it to cold when I shut it off as the faucet was nothing like the ones I had grown used to before. As such, the shower gushed freezing streams so cold that they stirred bad memories in an instant and I flinched, pulling my arms against my chest and feeling my muscles tighten violently. “Hot, not cold, not cold...” I hadn’t meant to speak and the words came out in a muddled whimper. I knew from experience that I would have a flashback if that cold water didn’t go away fast.   
I hadn’t expected him to obey. Although I had encouraged him and I did want him sexually, I had the feeling that he would have done whatever he wanted from the moment he had walked in. If he wanted to kill me, I would end up dead. If he wanted sex, he would rape me and he wouldn’t care at all. If he wanted to make me suffer, he could easily do so. If he wanted to make me suffer, he would ignore any pleas that might escape my lips and leave the freezing water running. I couldn’t see him and I couldn’t hear him move, but the water was suddenly hot, scaldingly hot. It stung and reddened my skin where it struck me as I opened my eyes.   
His face was a mask again, a cold blank stare that revealed absolutely nothing about his motivations or his intentions. He grabbed my good arm and used it to turn me so my chest pressed against the wall. The crimson tile left an impression in my bruised skin. He kept my arm in an expert hold, pinning me in the corner of the shower facing away from him. I had expected him to be strong, but it wasn’t just that: he knew how to use his strength to the best advantage and I was completely powerless to resist, as I had expected. I didn’t care to fight back, but I knew that if I had, I would never have been able to stop him. As fearless as I often was, that complete lack of control managed to terrify me almost as much as it turned me on. I felt the hand of my broken arm tightening around the stone stallion until the edges of the rock dug painfully into my slender fingers.   
He gathered my long hair together and twisted it to keep it that way. When he didn’t let go, I realized that he planned to use that as another method of controlling me. As if he needed another way to do that.   
I knew by this point that he wanted sex, but I hadn’t really prepared myself for the inevitable point when that would really start, so it would have come as a shock when he thrust in even under more normal circumstances. The hot water and my injuries already made this agonizing, but that reached a whole new level when Todd shoved himself into me. He felt huge. Maybe that was how it always felt or just because my muscles inevitably resisted, tense and aching as they already were, but I swear he must have been even bigger than I was, and thicker.   
I whimpered despite myself, but a large part of me loved that agony. I guess I tended to hate myself enough that suffering held a particular attraction for me, but there was also the constant similarity of pain and pleasure.   
* * *  
I generally had little to no preference as to the gender of my sexual partners. I suppose that I found women slightly more attractive and my experience had generally been with women, but I really didn’t care. Frankly, I tended to seek out such activities only on rare occasions. Not to say that I was inexperienced, per say, but I did not care about experience and as pleasurable as many encounters had been, I found that such things tended to be a hassle, perhaps more so for me than for most men, although I preferred not to believe such things. My first experiences had been early in my life, by American standards, and entirely unpleasant. My first voluntary experience had been shortly after Caesar personally insisted that I begin to visit the Legion slave women as I had recently been placed in charge of the frumentari, the Legion’s order of spies. It was Legion policy that all men, especially officers, commit some time to produce sons for the Legion and few men needed any incentive to do so. I had, on the other hand, preferred to focus on the work more specific to my talents and position. At Caesar’s instance, I had begun to engage in such activities with the often underfed and abused Legion slave women. Some time between the fifteenth consecutive serious injury and the second death, Caesar ordered an exception to this rule exclusively in my case. I was no longer expected to deal with the pitiful slaves and I suspect that I was also encouraged not to do so for the simple sake of keeping such living assets in good condition. Good condition was a relative statement. I highly doubted that any would have died given proper nutrition and medical care, but perhaps I was simply more destructive than even I realized or intended to be.   
Although those who knew, particularly Caesar, seemed to almost pity me at first, I quickly found use for this newfound ability to cause pain in pursuit of pleasure in my work. Torture became particularly effective when I could also use it to relieve such instinctive urges in a potentially enjoyable way. Killing two birds with one stone, as the saying goes. The profligate women I had had dalliances with had generally been much more capable of dealing with my size. Physically, all of them had been in far better condition than the Legion women and I suspected that this was the reason for their ability to tolerate and, in some cases, apparently enjoy my actions. That hardly mattered, in the end, as I only proceeded to sexual relations in my work if I planned to kill the woman involved. I did not like the idea that I might produce a son from such unions and later either kill him accidentally or, worse yet, have him used to manipulate me. In the case of men, especially American men, I found that most were homophobic. This gave the method the additional benefit of tormenting them based on their ridiculous morals. I had obtained a great deal of valuable information in such ways. I generally did not bother to partner with men except for such purposes.   
This current interaction differed from all my previous encounters.   
I had toyed with the idea since I had first seen Jack Lachlan Maclean the fifth. I had never before seen a man with his unique build or appearance, and it fascinated me. Although clearly a man, his long hair and unusual face and figure seemed enticingly feminine. I had no preference between the genders, but this strangely effeminate man seemed somehow to combine the features that most attracted me to either. I had toyed with the idea of seducing him since I saw him at the Gomorrah. I had later contemplated the ideas’ possible use in any Legion plans for him, but decided against it at first. Finding him in the bath had changed my mind. I had expected to find him asleep. With the house’s few windows curtained, I had been unable to discern his location and thus it had caught me off guard to discover him nude when I entered the bathroom. The man’s reactions to my presence had further encouraged my libido and swayed my mind. I had originally planned a more direct and chaste method of questioning, likely ending in his death. This method may still end with his death, but I would at least enjoy the preceding time much more than I would have otherwise.   
I would learn his motives, allegiances, and anything else that might be of use to the Legion, and depending on his responses, I would decide if he lived or died tonight.   
I disliked the cold but could easily tolerate extreme temperatures, which was part of why I had left the water scaldingly hot. The heat flowing over my skin happened to be a luxury I valued greatly and I thoroughly enjoyed the rare opportunities when I could incorporate an additional hot shower into my day. I had felt secretly relieved when Jack had insisted against cold. I knew now that I could break him easily with cold water and kept that knowledge for future use, but I did not necessarily need to break him, only ensure that he was truthful, and his reactions so far had been strange enough to leave me uncertain as to my next course of action. I had expected the usual: crying, cursing, pleading, the typical responses to the pain I knew he had to be enduring. The hot water had to be hurting him unless he had acclimated himself to such temperatures as much as I had. As injured as he was, neither my grip on his arm nor any other contact or strain could be remotely pleasurable for him. I knew that the force of my thrusts would press his broken rib against the tile, making every breath a struggle for him, and likewise my size alone had to be agony for him. I also kept my motions intentionally rough, the way I liked it and the way I had grown used to when with men. But Jack, always surprising, seemed to enjoy the agony he must be experiencing.   
The groans as I pounded into him weren’t moans of pain so much as pleasure. As hard as I pushed against him, he pushed back. The tense muscles of his body quivered in places, reminding me of the Legion slave girls and, similarly, I felt his resisting body bruise and bleed, the blood making my motions easier. His breathing came in gasps, each as shaky as his straining and battered body. It was unclear whether this panting was owed to agony or ecstasy. Curious, I released his soaked hair and slid one hand down his leanly muscled abdomen to his groin. He was still somehow hard. How? As much as I told myself that I really didn’t care, the idea that he somehow enjoyed how sadistic I had learned to be enticed me (and, admittedly, I relished the opportunity to be so openly sadistic.)   
Jack’s broken arm shot to his cock as my hand returned to his hair. His height obscured my view, but his intention seemed obvious. I felt him alter his own motions to thrust against his hand in between pressing back against me. I noticed nothing odd at first, but then something seemed strange about the act. Rather than simply gripping his shaft, he held his hand fisted, palm up, and endeavored to rub himself with the back of his wrist, pressing his tip against the red tile to help. I already saw the grout leaving tiny cuts along the sensitive skin, but he didn’t seem to care. Why was he doing that so awkwardly? I realized only then that he held something in that hand and mentally cursed myself for being so oblivious. This wasn’t like me. I never missed anything. Why hadn’t I seen that? I made a mental note to pry his fingers from the object and discover its nature, but that could wait. It clearly could not help him here or he would have already used it.   
I had not bothered to hold back, and so it didn’t take very long before I felt the familiar heat rise in my chest and my erection began to throb inside him. That was about the time that I realized somewhat vaguely that he was holding his breath. I came at the same moment that I felt his stiff muscles quiver and contract around me. Surprise actually managed to break my carefully perfect mask of indifference. I had never felt that in a man and only once in a woman, so it took several seconds for me to place it as his own orgasm and notice the seed mixing with his blood in the crimson shower.   
We waited in silence in the steam and scalding water for more minutes than I cared to count as his breathing slowly returned to something more reasonable. I had the luxury of time as well as the hot water I was still enjoying, and I planned to take my time to move on to the actual interrogation. Besides, now I had to formulate a new method, this had taken a turn that none of my contingency plans had foreseen. If this man happened to be a potential ally, or even inconsequential to the Legion, I might look forward to further pleasant dealings with him. If that aligned with the Legion’s plans.   
* * *  
Everything hurt, somehow even more than before. I was pretty sure that he’d ruptured something inside me, but right now I couldn’t bring myself to care. That had been the most intense experience I had ever had, and that was really saying something. I sought pain and pleasure like a dog sought food; they were my drugs more so than any drug I had tried. At that moment I would have sworn that I wanted nothing more than to live a very short and dangerous life at the mercy of this man, provided he continued to give me that level of sensation whenever he deigned to do so. (I realize, in retrospect, that this was one of the most foolhardy notions I had ever had, but I have always tended to lose my mind a bit in the wake of an orgasm. I never claimed to be particularly sensible under normal circumstances either, I admit that I tend to act rashly.)  
Lost in a daze of pain and pleasure, I leaned against the wall in silence, completely oblivious to Todd’s actions behind me. In the fog of such sensations, I was caught completely off guard when he shut off the shower and grabbed my hair, hauling me back out of the tub. In the heat of the moment, he hadn’t bothered to close the shower curtain, and so much of the bathroom had been soaked, leaving the rug-less scarlet tile slick and shining. I nearly fell five times as he steered me towards the bedroom, but somehow he kept his balance and held me upright by my arm and hair. How could anyone have such perfect balance? He had to be two thirds my size, but he could hold me steady somehow when his own footing wasn’t much better!   
Reaching the relatively narrow path between the bathroom door and my massive bed, he nudged me forward. Nudge might not be the best term. He didn’t throw me towards the bed, but he wasn’t gentle. The push came much softer than I had expected, however, and that made me wonder what he wanted with me as I fell forwards onto the comforter. I expected him to follow and probably rape me again, or maybe just kill me for something I hadn’t noticed had annoyed him, but instead he simply stalked along the carpet, making his way over to the curtained arch between my bedroom and studio.   
Would this man forever be an enigma to me? I hoped he would. I found that I didn’t fear betrayal so much when I knew that it was inevitable. This man would kill me or at least ruin my life, of that I was certain, but knowing it from the start somehow made me alright with it. I had faith that he would end me, and because of that I found that I could trust him completely with that end hanging over me like a guillotine blade, but an untold infinity of pleasure between now and then. It was like gambling in reverse. I knew I would one day lose it all, but in the mean time I would win, and that made it worth it. Maybe it was a good thing that the doctor had surely lost all interest in me.   
I rolled farther onto the bed until I lay, sore and bloody but inexplicably energized and almost giddy. I curled my legs up over my back and rested my chin in my hands as I watched him. I felt oddly like a teenaged girl with that pose and, for once, I couldn’t care less. He was the only one who could see me here.   
And I alone could see him right now. That body was gorgeous. He moved like a wild animal, incredibly graceful and every move radiated power and threat. My perception of his size had been accurate, I had seen few men so well endowed even in porn. If he was just a reporter, I felt like the man was missing out, hell, the world was missing out! That was a cock to be shared!   
My thoughts derailed abruptly as he turned his back to me to glance behind the curtain into my studio. Todd’s back was a lattice of thin white scars. Whip scars. I wanted to think he was just into hardcore BDSM, but somehow this looked worse. But who used whips for any other purposes?   
Those scars worried me a little. They were old, but they still made me curious, and somehow my bliss gave me the nerve to ask softly, “Todd? Um...what exactly happened to your back?” I could hardly have been more blunt, and I regretted speaking at all the instant that those steely eyes locked onto me again. My ability to speak just died in my throat right then.   
* * *  
The question surprised me. My back was fine. Nothing had happened to my back in years. Had anything ever happened to my back? Yes. My encyclopedic memory placed the last instance a bit belatedly and I deduced the most likely reason for his question. I had nearly been crucified for dissent several years ago, and I had been whipped brutally before the sentence had been revoked. I remembered that the injury had been both agonizing and untreated; it had likely left scars. Scars which I had somehow failed to recall. What was it about this man that perforated my normally impregnable memory?   
Berating myself at the lapse , I spoke without thinking. “My name is not Todd. In private you may call me Vulpes Inculta.” I paused, mentally cursing the introduction I hadn’t meant to give. Why had I told him my name, or at least the name that I felt the most pride in using? Todd Acerbi was an alias, of course, one of many, but I had not been born Vulpes Inculta either. I did not use the name that I had been born with.   
* * *  
Vulpes Inculta. I knew his first name still meant fox, just in a different language, but Inculta was something else. I’d have to look it up later.   
“My back is unimportant.” And when he stared at me like he was going to kill me, I felt more than willing to leave it at that and ask no further questions. The man was paralytically terrifying. He had been focused at least partly on the room even once he looked at me, but now his gaze got the added intensity of purpose and he crossed the carpet to the bed in two quick steps. I found it surprising how casually he ignored his own nudity. Even in my time with Ven I had never seen anyone so calmly naked and I had never in my entire life remained nude when it wasn’t necessary. California was full of firsts for me. I lay on my stomach mostly because of my own modesty, but Vulpes walked around quite confidently, completely ignoring the very obvious dangly bits and that astounded me even if he hadn’t made it more unintentionally apparent by sitting cross-legged on the bed in front of me. At least, I don’t think that he intended to draw my intention back to such things. His eyes focused on my folded hands with a very different kind of intensity, somewhere between curiosity and suspicion. He probably saw me starting to blush even if I couldn’t get hard again this quickly, but he ignored that as well.   
“What have you been holding?”   
My blush intensified. “Uh-I-It’s just a...souvenir. An old friend gave it to me a long time ago.”  
“You always bathe with souvenirs?” He grabbed my hands and forced them apart, separating my left, the palm that held the stone stallion, and peeling back my fingers. I complied, afraid that he’d break the bones if I tried to resist at all. I might have fought his grip otherwise. It felt almost wrong to let him see.   
“No. Just...thinking. It’s been a crazy day. I like...I like to hold this and...remember.” I looked away, glancing over the blood stains I was leaving on the quilt in my effort to avoid his eyes. Now it really reminded me of home. To shake the memory, I looked back at Vulpes and found him running his elegant fingers over the damp carved stone, a strange look on his face. He was almost frowning, clearly thinking about something. I didn’t dare to ask. I didn’t want to explain the stone’s origin in greater detail. It felt wrong to tell him about that wonderfully kind boy I had known in the far North, perhaps because the two of them could hardly be more different. The child had been innocent, blissful, and gentle, while this man seemed best described as skilled, deadly, and grim. Or perhaps not grim. Perhaps simply focused. He had smiled, he had, perhaps, joked, but from what he’d said the other evening, these were dark times. Maybe he was just too familiar with that darkness to see the joy, not that I found optimism remotely easy myself. Apathy, hedonism, and pessimism just made it tough to disappoint me. If I got laid I’d be happy because with my luck I generally didn’t expect to get laid. I kept my expectations low to stave off the crushing despair that so often threatened my life.  
When Vulpes met my gaze again after several long moments staring at the stone while I thought, his expression seemed somehow softer, although I wasn’t sure I trusted that appearance. He pressed the stone back into my palm and closed my hand around it before straightening his back a bit. He had been leaning forward slightly to see the stone and now, sitting up on the bed, he seemed taller, but less imposing with this sudden change in attitude. He even smiled, just a little, more in his eyes than his mouth. I had quickly learned that all his sincere expressions were very subtle. “Quite the eventful life you must lead, du, den die Götter nieden.”   
I recognized the language as German. I was almost fluent in German, but the verb escaped my memory, and without it the sentence made little sense. I frowned in confusion. “I almost understood that. Do you often throw German into your conversations?”  
He seemed disappointed and stood again. “I had expected you to speak German. I will translate if you wish.”   
“Why did you think that I spoke German?” He blatantly ignored my question, watching me calmly, nudely, all the while as if to emphasize that he simply wasn’t going to explain despite my curiosity. I wasn’t sure if I found that response more frustrating or more tantalizing. The man was a mystery. A sexy, sexy mystery. Who would probably murder me in my sleep, and I was surprisingly okay with that.   
I sighed and stretched my aching muscles, rolling onto my back. “The only thing I didn’t understand was the verb.”   
“`Neiden’ means `coveted.’”   
I frowned and stared at him, resting my arms on my chest and watching him upside-down as I lay on my back. “`You, whom the gods covet’? Are all Americans so flattering? I’ve had two of you say similar things to me since I got here.”  
Again he gave me a strange look and a tilt of his head. “I thought you said that I was Russian?”  
“Are you Russian?” I didn’t really expect a response and I didn’t get one.   
He tilted his head the other way, that ghost of a grin coming back. “What do you think?”  
I snorted. “I think you’re never going to tell me, are you?”  
“How perceptive of you. Now, I believe you got me sidetracked quite some time ago, so I’ll ask again, what brings you to this city?”  
He sat on the bed again, letting his legs drape off the end and leaning back so that I could see his face without continuing to tilt my neck painfully. The position hid the rest of him from me and I couldn’t decide if that annoyed me or relieved me. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to tell him why I was here and that deceptive calm in his smiling eyes lulled me into a false peace. “What is this exactly? You break in to question me? How did you get in here anyway?”  
As if a switch had been flicked, that dangerous intensity returned to Vulpes and his stare felt like a blade at my throat. “It is not difficult to access your balcony and the porch doors do not lock, now answer the question.”   
I swallowed. Okay, maybe I’d been wrong to relax around him. Lying seemed like an even worse idea. “I had to leave Scotland, San Francisco seemed more...hospitable to someone like me, and it sounded like the climate would be sort of the same.” I could see him evaluating the truth of my response as that terrifying gleam in his eyes faded back to calm.   
* * *  
“What is your profession? Are you affiliated with any organization or person in this city?” I was being blunt. I saw the fear in Jack’s uniquely lavender eyes and judged that he would not lie.   
He hesitated. He remained silent for so long that I began to contemplate different methods of torture and the need for such tactics before he replied very softly, “I’ve met some people since I got here. I guess you could say that I’m `affiliated’ with the doctor you saw me with earlier, but as far as professional relationships go, I’m only with my publishers, and not very loyal to them. I...I write porn.”   
I blinked very slowly. I knew that much. I could guess to some degree why he left Scotland. I found it more surprising that he had admitted that to me when my investigation had suggested that he lied about it whenever possible, which made sense. Frankly, the Legion perceptions of profligates seemed almost hypocritical in that regard. Sex and nudity were much more taboo among profligates, or so I had found, although Legion beliefs about profligates seemed true in most other regards. That had also surprised me: Jack, by his medical records and much of the other evidence I had discovered, had only sampled alcohol once in his life and his experience with drugs had been similar. Likewise, Jack did not often watch television and avoided almost all other things that the Legion considered to be vices, except sex and pornography, obviously. Although he used a computer frequently, I would be a hypocrite if I held that against him as I rarely followed that particular Legion restriction myself. I was granted exceptions to that rule, but I more than exceeded them. In general, I found Jack to be decently close to the kind of profligate that Caesar might come to respect. If, as I believed, he was not working against the Legion...he could be a valuable asset.   
* * *  
“Um...what do you think?” I felt everything tensing up yet again and started to wonder if I had developed another situation that would trigger my PTSD. I stared at that annoyingly unreadable blank stare and tried to hide my simmering breakdown. I’d only told him because I’d been afraid that he might kill me, and I’d hoped that a man so dangerous, who surely had so many secrets of his own, might understand or at least might not care. His silence was unnerving.   
“You mentioned loyalty. Are you a loyal person?” Okay, just pretend I never said anything. That was fine. Perfectly fine. I wasn’t completely freaking out inside because you probably despise me just like everyone else I’ve told that to, except my publishers and creepy fans. Great, just great. Mental breakdown, here I come, yet again!  
Somehow that emotionless mask was contagious. I stared blankly back at him and kept my voice even. “I don’t really have anyone to be loyal to, right now. I suppose if I find someone, I may be loyal. I have never had occasion to judge my loyalty to anyone.” Seconds from the inevitable emotional breakdown, I hung on his next words.   
He considered me silently. “And what is it that you might be loyal to, then? What would commit your allegiance to a cause or organization? What is your motivation?”   
I rolled abruptly to lie on my stomach again and rested my face on my folded, aching arms, letting my still-soaked hair completely curtain my head.   
* * *  
I puzzled the strange reaction, debating whether or not I should reposition his hair so that I could read his expression. Jack was always either transparent to me or completely enigmatic, and this fell into the latter category of reactions. I had absolutely no idea what had prompted this nor what to do about it. My ideas ranged from torture to false comfort, or, perhaps, not-quite-false comfort. This was a rare man indeed, to entice me so much that I might be sincere in some minimal instinct that resembled compassion. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that right now, and I dismissed the thought, hovering one arm uncertainly over him as I considered what to do.   
I heard the change in his breathing and saw the subtle quiver of his back before I made up my mind. He was crying. Not loudly and not excessively, but a little. The man was likely in pain, I supposed, but this seemed emotional. What had I said? I hoped he would stop quickly, the action annoyed me and it stirred feelings that I couldn’t quite place. I was relieved when he spoke, even if it was muffled and heavily accented. His accent gave me little trouble.   
“Sorry. I’m not sure what my motivation would be. Those whom I might have been loyal to...were not loyal to me. They’re gone. I...I suppose that I might be loyal to someone who would accept me for the person I am. Or for someone who could do that and keep me safe. And be there for me, I guess.” He fell silent but did not continue to cry, thank the gods.   
I considered that response. It was a simple response. No mention of morality, entirely selfish, but the man had been betrayed, I suspected, and so selfishness seemed particularly understandable. Companionship was an easy price for the Legion. Given that he did not know my loyalties, I suspected that he referred to me specifically in his answers. Companionship could be a simple matter. Acceptance was already a given; I did not care what he did and as long as my reputation and Jack’s practiced caution kept his less Legion-friendly traits hidden, it would be simple for the Legion to accept him as well. I would say that safety, too, was a simple compensation, but in Jack’s case, fate could skew any precautions that might be taken by either the Legion or myself; there were no guarantees.   
I remained silent for several minutes, debating what to tell Caesar and considering if there was anything else I should say to Jack.   
Abruptly, Jack shook his hair back and looked over at me. When he spoke, his voice was as calm and even as my own, confirming my belief that the man was excellent at hiding things. “Earlier you had said that you thought I was `a man coveted by the gods.’ What exactly did you mean by that?”  
“I meant that you are a man at once lucky and unlucky, but more extreme than those words imply. It is as if, in a polytheistic belief, several deities favor you and bestow incredible blessings upon you while several others curse you and cause catastrophe to surround your life. As if gods are battling over your improbable existence. You are improbability, the man who gets struck by lightning every day and is never killed.”  
Jack laughed grimly. “Somehow, that sounds even more flattering. What exactly makes you think I have been `blessed’? I can see `cursed’ easily enough.” He gestured to his broken arm, although his bloody body seemed the more obvious example.   
I stared at him. Was it truly possible that he did not see how lucky he was, or was he simply testing my knowledge and powers of observation? “For one, you have this magnificent house in the best neighborhood in town. You also have great talent in art and more obvious talent in writing, regardless of your genre. You were born to wealth, and yet you have more than decupled that fortune in your own earnings alone. Your intellect far exceeded that of your peers even in the competitive Scottish school system and only the stress of external circumstances drove you to fail and drop out of university. You have also traveled widely and experienced more of life than most people ever will. And, in the entire world, you have had the luck to meet me multiple times.”  
He froze. “How exactly do you know all that? Why did you ask about my job, if you already knew?”  
* * *  
Vulpes just grinned that slight, enigmatic smile. He wasn’t going to answer my first question, but he did add a quiet response to the second. “I found it interesting to hear if you would respond truthfully when asked.” Oh. Okay, that made sense, I supposed. He was psychoanalyzing me, wasn’t he? And he was probably good at it. Damn it, I was an open book, wasn’t I? Then again, if he could read me easily, and he was still this calm and hadn’t killed me yet, that was a good thing. If he knew the worst about me and didn’t care, this terrifying man could easily be and provide everything I had ever wanted in life, along with a heavy dose of danger. I found that I still didn’t value life my own life enough to care about the incredible threat that he posed as long as he accepted me, didn’t desert me, and kept me safe from the things that weren’t himself. One double-edged sword was far better than a world of potentially unexpected dangers and betrayal.   
Vulpes stood and paced, slinking silently and gracefully across the carpet as he examined my bedroom. I wanted to know how he knew so much about me, but I doubted that I could ever find out, so my curiosity would have to be ignored. As he paused to scrutinize my desk, he asked another question. “What brought you to the Gomorrah on that first day?”  
Why _was_ he asking so many questions? Why did this matter? Surely I wasn’t interesting enough to bother writing an article about? Maybe old habits just died hard? I shrugged. “Like I said earlier, I just wandered the city and ended up there.”  
“And you often wander cities on foot when you first arrive?”  
“I don’t like cars.”   
* * *  
I supposed that made sense. I had discovered a brutal car crash in his youth, he may have some kind of trauma associated with it, and he had seemed to prefer other methods of transportation now that I thought over my research again. But surely there was more than pure chance, or else the man’s fate was even more unlikely than I had come to believe possible.   
“Surely something steered you there?”  
Jack frowned at me. “Why is that even important? Nothing steered me there, I just happened to head that direction. I let my feet take me where they would.”  
* * *  
He moved abruptly to sit beside me, resting so far up the bed that his hips were beside my head. He leaned forward to look at me, that intensity back in his stare. “Are you absolutely certain that nothing drew you there?”  
I frowned. “Yeah, if anything guided me, it was subconscious. Why does it matter?”  
As I asked the question, he rested a hand on my head and gradually curled his fingers into my hair. Tightly. ...What was he doing...?   
“The organization I serve finds you interesting. Now, what do you know about that doctor friend of yours?”  
I frowned a little nervously. “What exactly do you want to know? Do you have some kind of interrogation fetish or something?” With my arms folded under my chin, my fingers ended up pretty close to his upper thigh. I took the opportunity to flex them and stroke his leg. His skin felt almost as soft as mine over the solid muscles and I felt his hand shift in my hair as I touched him.   
“No. I am merely more used to such situations. Has he told you anything about himself?” He pulled my hair to force me to slide my legs forward and sit up. With all my muscles aching, the movement was awkward and much less flattering than what I might otherwise have attempted. I couldn’t even _try_ a split when everything was so sore and tense. Vulpes followed the motion by kneeling on the bed and moving closer to me. I half suspected what he was planning from that subtle grin as well as from our positions, but he didn’t openly explain his intentions, and, again, I doubted I could have stopped him had I wanted to.   
I thought and only noticed then that I knew next to nothing about the man who’d shared my bed the previous two nights. He had an odd way of making me feel like I could trust him completely without actually telling me anything about himself. Distracted by Vulpes’ intent, I only answered when those steely eyes briefly lost their smile.   
“I didn’t even know his name until the second day. He hasn’t told me about himself at all.”   
That smile returned and even spread to his lips just a little. “Then we can proceed to more enjoyable activities.” His gaze proved even more captivating than I had yet realized: I only noticed that his massive cock had gotten hard again when he forced me down by my hair and shoved it into my mouth. It was a very good thing that I had learned long ago to control my gag reflex.   
I sucked at him as I hard as I could manage, doing everything I could think of with my mouth and tongue. I prayed that all my research had taught me something. I hadn’t really had time to ask for a critique before and I wasn’t entirely convinced that he wouldn’t kill me if I didn’t do this well. My obsession with sex had better not fail me now...  
* * *  
I pounded into his mouth, keeping my reaction veiled as I watched Jack. I had rarely tried oral sex before and only once with a willing partner. By my judgement, he seemed skilled, although I wasn’t the best judge of such things. He managed to move his throat so it almost seemed to stroke me inside of him while his tongue varied its motions in his mouth. He knelt above his hands and the subtle rocking of his hips told me that he was also enjoying this. It was rare that I let my partners do such things, but I did not stop Jack. It surprised me that he could breathe— I had expected that I would need to cut this short or change my methods, but he somehow found air around my cock, or else he held his breath quite expertly and for much longer than normally possible. My surprise kept me from conceiving of harming him during this. He seemed to enjoy my methods and size and I guess that enticed me much more than I had expected. I wanted to watch someone enjoy in this context the skills I used to break those I dealt with in my work. I suppose it must be the novelty of the idea that I found so irresistible.   
But the main goal of this second session was a bit different than that. I knew this bed. The house had belonged to the Legion for years while legally under the ownership of someone else, first my predecessor and then Ulysses, who had rarely been in residence. While the owner was absent, countless legionaries had made use of the bed for recreational purposes similar to my own current actions. They had often used the slaves housed below, but almost as frequently their victims had been recruits and the like. I could tell that the mattress and coverings were new, however they still matched the crimson, black, and white that they had been before and even bore a similar pattern of embroidery. The quilt was new, but with the way that Jack had drawn back to kneel, it now lay mostly behind me, crumpled at the end of the bed. I had never had any desire to see this bed again and even with the new coverings, I despised the unpleasantly vast piece of furniture.   
My thoughts and memories held back my orgasm, but Jack, unhindered or perhaps unaided by such, came quickly. I felt his breathing as he somehow gasped air around my shaft. Although probably unintentional, the feeling sent a shiver of pleasure down my spine. I paused my thrusts until he could breathe and watched his seed spurt out over the bed, trying to use the sight to fuel my own arousal and forget what bed we were on. Somehow I managed to succeed. The instant Jack’s breathing calmed, I pounded into him more roughly than before.   
* * *  
He almost choked me when I finished and he started back up. Unable to breathe with him hammering into my mouth like that, I held my breath in the hope that he’d finish before I passed out. I redoubled all my efforts to get him off, now less afraid that he’d kill me intentionally and more afraid that he’d accidentally suffocate me. I hadn’t really expected him to let me have a wank while I did this, and the fact that he had made me feel like somehow he wasn’t quite as likely to murder me. I still doubted he’d care much if he did accidentally cause my death. I felt the velvety skin of his cock start to throb and sucked harder, expecting to work him through the orgasm before he’d pull out and I could breathe again. I’d been wrong. He grabbed my chin in his free hand and planted a thumb over my lower lip, pushing down and forcing my mouth open. My lungs reflexively gasped for air as he did that; I’d pushed myself just a little too close to suffocation. I felt so lightheaded that I nearly fell over. Managing to stay upright on my hands and knees, my vision blurred and I lost track of him for several seconds until the first jet of hot semen hit my face. Somehow I hadn’t expected that. In my oxygen-starved haze, I don’t know how many times he came or even if all of it hit me, but it seemed like a lot and when I regained the ability to process what I was seeing, I realized that both myself and the scarlet comforter were fairly covered with the slick white of cum. That mask of neutrality revealed nothing, but he seemed satisfied. I sat back on my calves, exhausted and unwilling to move my agonized limbs. After a moment of surveying the mess as he caught his breath, Vulpes stepped backwards off the bed, somehow sliding smoothly from a kneeling position to standing on the carpet in front of the bathroom. I marveled at that grace, still too dizzy and sore to move or think coherently.   
Vulpes tilted his head, considering my continued panting. “Paint me something.”  
“Anything. Any...preferences?” I paused because I still felt like I couldn’t breathe— my rib was hurting worse than usual.   
“Surprise me.” He slunk back through the bathroom, disappearing into the alcove. I heard him close the painting behind him.   
I sat on the bed, failing to catch my breath for over ten minutes before I gave up. I was tired, and in pain, and between the head injuries and having almost passed out, I somehow managed to have lost my appetites for both sex and pain. I needed to fix this. My ass felt like I’d taken my mother literally and shoved my fortune up there. If she was right about everything I did being a sin, that was probably why it burned so much. I had hell in my ass, boulders on my lungs, and my head felt almost disconnected from the agony and exhaustion of my body. I wanted to sleep forever, but I knew that if I closed my eyes, I probably would. I guess a lot had changed since the mysterious and deadly Vulpes Inculta had broken into my house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter name from the Michael Jackson Song  
> I feel like this chapter got very long as well, I keep trying to rein it in a bit... XD


	11. One Week

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from the song "One Week" by the Bare Naked Ladies. It also managed to get longer than I had planned, I'm starting to think that I just can't regulate length. XD Also, yes, this is going to start dealing with various holidays. I'd hoped to reach at least one of them when the actual holiday was going on, but it looks like that won't be happening.

I needed to clean myself up before I could go anywhere for help, so I headed for the shower. I guess adrenaline or lust must have given me strength because now I found I could barely move. I crawled into the bath, every square of crimson tile a struggle. The dark red grout between the tiles scraped more skin from my tattered body and I streaked the floor red between my crawl to the bath and my subsequent, slightly cleaner, stumble back to the bed. I somehow managed to don enough clothes that I could go out in public. Every move was an effort, but I opted for underwear beneath my oldest, loosest jeans in the hope that it might help hide the bleeding. That was also the only reason that I threw a waterproof green winter jacket over my chest rather than go shirtless. I had seen shirtless people around the city, and I didn’t expect a cab or hospital to turn me away, but I looked less like I had just been raped, I thought, if I hid as much skin as possible. That said, my feet were fairly decent, so I gratefully slipped on my outdoor suede slippers rather than struggle to don and tie boots. I must have been bleeding more than I thought because, by the time I felt decent enough to be seen, I felt the numbness in my fingers and noticed my tired body trying to shiver. I was freezing. That was probably due to blood loss.   
The blood-soaked quilt was the nearest blanket and I wrapped it around me, much too exhausted to find an alternative. The stairs and hallway loomed ahead like a marathon.   
Only the sudden chime of the doorbell provided the motivation I needed to make that last effort to reach the door. I collapsed against the doorframe, barely maintaining the appearance of standing. Without one hand desperately clinging to the hat hook on the wall, I would have dropped to the floor. As it was, my fumbling fingers managed to turn the handle and pull inward.   
Veronica stood before me on the porch, wearing the same mechanic’s jumpsuit as always, and she blanched visibly when she saw me. “Um, wow! Are you alright, Jack?”   
I shook my head. I had the quilt up over my hair like a hood and I’m pretty sure I was shaking. Hunched in the doorway, bloody, and visibly groggy, I probably looked like a hung-over Russian grandma— one who had beaten a bar-full of men, to incorporate the amount of blood both on and in me. My memory was pretty vague at the time, but I either tried to step onto the porch or shifted my aching legs and my knee buckled. Veronica caught me as I fell. For the second time that day I was awed by the incredible strength of someone much shorter than me; she supported my weight easily and hauled me to her car. I think she said something about the hospital and asked me questions, but I was much too out-of-it to answer.   
I regained some level of coherence when I woke up on a bed in the crowded ER. A digital clock on a display near me proclaimed 4:15 am. Fear chilled my gut. Arcade was _not_ working today, right? The last thing I needed was to have to explain this to him. True enough, I had Vulpes, but Arcade at least seemed less likely to kill me. I guess, deep down, I would rather have him, if I could manage not to piss him off like I always seemed to do. But he’d seemed deeply mad at me about something, and we hadn’t exactly ended on good terms. He’d probably lost all interest in me, anyway.   
There were a lot of other patients around, almost all of them in much worse condition. I saw doctors rushing past in all directions, several wheeling gurneys, and a variety of alarms kept crying from all around me. In the chaos I caught snatches of conversation. Shrapnel in the chest cavity. Another ten dead en-route. Fifty missing at the site. It seemed that a fashionable hotel had been bombed.   
I couldn’t really do anything about that and the doctors seemed to have stabilized me so they could deal with the crisis. Exhausted and bored, I dozed off for a while. When I awoke, I was in a room. I had been alone when I’d awakened previously, but now I was not. Raul sat in a chair beside the hospital bed where I lay. He had a magazine open on his lap, Popular Mechanics, judging from the look of the article, but his eyes were closed and he seemed asleep. I’d been dressed in a hospital gown, as usual, but it and the thin blanket covered me effectively, thank god, so I didn’t mind.   
“Raul?”  
He twitched awake. “Wha—? Oh, hey, Jack. The doc patched you up. She said she’d be back in to talk to you. Veronica was here a while, but she had to sleep. She knows I get up early, so she called me in. You look worse than I feel. What happened?”  
I tried not to blush, but I think I probably failed. “A guy got in through the balcony. And I was in a car crash yesterday.”   
“Boss, you keep living such a crazy life and you won’t last long. Might want to wear a helmet until you get off god’s hit list. And we heard about the crash on the news. It was nasty. I might not be the most perceptive old man around, but Mexico City’s starting to seem safer than here. They mentioned you by name and said that you were one of only two people to survive and not end up in critical condition. That was why Veronica tried to stop by to see you in the first place. The bus just clipped you or something, right?”  
I thought back. I know that the bus had been about to hit us full on, but it didn’t. I considered the angle of the car and everything else I could remember about the incident. Arcade must have avoided it as much as possible. I was surprised that he’d been able to at all, that suggested that he had been in crises before, probably fairly often. I also realized that he had saved my life by acting so quickly. He’d saved his own as well, but he’d probably saved mine at other times too. I owed my life to him. The realization hit me hard and it made me want to see him even more.   
“The bus sheared off the front of the car,” I explained to Raul, watching his shock and adding, “but neither of us got hurt very much.”  
“`Us’? You and that blonde guy? If it was that junker Focus, the crash is almost a blessing.”  
“It was the Focus, and his name’s Arcade.” I thought for a moment, realizing that I’d been given pain medicine when my thoughts came so slowly. “He’ll have gotten a new car by now, I guess...”  
“Good thing. If that Focus managed not to kill you in that crash, it was a lucky break, the thing was falling apart inside.”  
I nodded and tried to sit up. Even numbed by the medications, my muscles fought every movement and bending my back shot needles through my insides. I winced and doubled over.   
“Man, you really must have taken a beating if you can still hurt; you should have seen how much morphine they gave you! It could have knocked out a horse!” I was tempted to make an awkward pun and I would have if the doctor with a mohawk hadn’t walked in right then.   
“Wonderful to see you awake! I had hoped that we wouldn’t need to treat you again so soon.” I looked up at her and managed to put on some level of a stoic facade. There were only a few people I’d really let myself show weakness to, provided I could control it. Having PTSD triggered by such common things as cars and cold water kinda made my vulnerabilities a bit difficult to hide. And this woman was the same doctor who’d treated me, but still.   
She hesitated for a moment and looked awkwardly at Raul. “I’m sorry, sir, but you aren’t a close relative. I’d like to speak to Jack privately for a few moments; there are chairs in the hallway.”   
I’d picked up on how much the old man loved sarcasm and well-intentioned complaining, so it surprised me when he relocated with nothing more than a soft, “Okay.”  
Julie moved closer and explained quietly. “You have fairly severe internal injuries and you should take a course of antibiotics in addition to the pain killers and anti-inflammatories we’ve already prescribed from your previous visits.” I nodded and managed to sit up without wincing too much. She rested a hand on my arm gently. “Jack, are you okay? Our services are completely confidential, but you really should file a police report if-”  
“Thank you. Thank you so much, but I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I just need some rest. And the medicine. I don’t suppose you can fill prescriptions here, can you?”   
She smiled, but I saw the worry still there in her eyes. Part of me felt guilty about that and another part found it incredibly comforting. She held out a white bag. “Arcade mentioned earlier that he’d been taking you to pick up your medicine when you got in the crash. I figured I’d save you the trouble this time. We have a pharmacy, but normally it’s only available for patients staying in the hospital. You are hurt pretty badly and if you’re not safe at home, especially, you can feel free to-”  
“Sorry. Thank you, but no. I really should get back home, and I’m usually safe there. I...” I looked around and noticed my clothes in a bag on the chair next to where Raul had been sleeping. That saved me the trouble of asking where they were. Julie seemed to understand my intention as I looked at the bag. She handed me the medicine.   
“Please keep up with the dosage and try to stay healthy. If something’s wrong, you can always come by.”   
“Thank you. Again, you’ve been so helpful, thank you.” Between her and Arcade, I was beginning to wonder if this hospital wasn’t populated entirely by saints. I really didn’t deserve this kind of treatment; it made me somewhat uncomfortable. Julie smiled worriedly and turned to leave. I added hastily as she neared the curtain, “Please don’t tell Arcade!”  
I guess the thinly veiled panic of my tone alarmed her, because she looked even more concerned about me when she turned back. I added more calmly, “I mean, this was... I don’t want him to worry.” Trying not to lie to him, even through the information I gave another person, got complicated when I wasn’t quite sure what to call the encounter I’d just had.   
Julie’s worried stare rivaled my mother’s. My family had always wielded guilt like a claymore and somehow she managed to contend with that. Those soft brown eyes tore at my years of resistance to such looks, but didn’t quite break me. Her voice nearly did when, after a moment, she answered sadly, “Okay...”  
The curtain of the room was closed, so once Julie left I changed and headed out into the hall with my medicine. Once I was moving, my stiff muscles loosened up a little, and as long as I didn’t bend my back or walk too heavily, I could step without collapsing in pain. I probably did have enough painkiller in my system to tranq a horse, or at least that was how my foggy mind felt. Raul got up when he saw me and, to my embarrassment, helped me out the door. “Easy does it. I’ll drive you home. This isn’t just neighborly kindness, so you know, Veronica bribed me with donuts and tequila. The girl’s trying to ruin my teeth and my work ethic at the same time. You should thank her. You should also probably take it easy for a few days. Moving around or finding any more excitement is a bad idea.” I think I nodded and said something back, but now that I wasn’t actively trying to seem in control, all the morphine and everything else were really getting to me. I don’t actually remember getting back to my house and, thanks to a dozen bottles of Veronica’s promised tequila (which I later learned that she had bought from Cass,) Raul had no memory of it either.   
I woke up sprawled and aching on my sofa the next evening. Taking the next doses of all the medicines proved helpful. I ultimately felt better than the previous day and with all the emotions still inside me, I went upstairs to paint. The bedroom was still a mess, but I would get to that later.   
I have found that the longer I went without looking at a work, the more I noticed when I saw it again, and so it was with the lion. I could see the parts that had turned out well, but the whole thing had somehow lost everything that I’d been trying to portray. Damn lion. Forgetting completely about my plans and ideas— my real reasons for coming up here— I spent over an hour adjusting the lion, struggling in vain to re-inject the emotions and subtext that it had completely lost. Finally, in aggravation, I flipped the whole canvas upside-down. That somehow worked.   
I mixed up some shades of red and made adjustments. When I was done, a skeletal feline stared down at the reflection of the beast it had been in life, a sad and beaten looking lion with blood in its tattered mane. There. That worked perfectly.   
I set the finished piece aside and got to work on others. For the next week, the metaphorical muse consumed me.   
When I got emotional, I usually got creative. It wasn’t always a good thing and I wasn’t always able to take that time. My last major crisis had led into such a chaotic time in my life that I hadn’t gotten a chance to sit down and work it out in art, that was why I’d tried to write right after I first arrived at my new home. But as they say of mice and men, plans go awry and so this ended up being my first chance to let that all out creatively in months. In those months, lot had happened that I needed to work out.   
My work was, as usual proportionate to the massive range of emotions I’d roller-coastered through in recent times. Even when I wasn’t upset, I channeled emotions and energy into creative works, but when I was upset that hobby became a full scale addiction. I painted until my arm refused to rise to the canvas. I wrote until my muscles recovered. Normally, I wrote quickly. I could generally type upwards of a hundred words per minute, faster than most secretaries I’d met, not that I often ran into secretaries. I could churn out a novel in a day, if the mood struck, not that coming up with plot often made that easy. That said, it wasn’t uncommon for me to send ten or more drafts to my publishers in the space of a week when I got in a writing mood. This week, however, I only threw together a series of three, amid the much more time intensive and painful act of painting.   
When I say that my creativity tended to become an addiction, I mean that in every sense. For the week after my visit to the hospital, I only left my house once. I ate when I started to feel like I’d pass out if I didn’t. I showered when I hit a block in my writing and my arms hadn’t recovered from the previous ten hours of painting. I slept when I passed out from exhaustion. I only remembered the medicine because the pain served as another distraction from my real drug. Glancing out of the window while I painted on the fourth consecutive day, shortly after I’d showered to soothe my arms and stop their damn quivering, I noticed orange and purple lights on a house down the street. A few other houses had lights or carved pumpkins in their yards. I remembered reading about Halloween a long time ago, but I’d never seen it and I hadn’t realized how close it was getting. I had to check my phone to remember the date. I’d lost three days in my mental clock. It was the twenty-fifth of October. How had it gotten so late in the year already?   
I had always wanted to see an American Halloween. Being as morbid as I was, in particular, I wanted to experience this holiday in person. I should decorate. The idea managed to break my creative addiction and I was dressed and on the street in a matter of minutes. I needed a pumpkin. I needed a knife. I had a knife. Could my knife cut a pumpkin? Maybe. I’d buy one that I knew could handle it. I needed lights. What else did Americans put up? On the stairs now, I passed that black cat, licking its paws. Maybe there were fake black cats. Black cats were Halloween-themed, right?  
I pondered such decorating ideas all the way over the hill, heading for a store that had looked like it might have such things. Thoughts of my art were completely driven from my mind and I found myself increasingly excited by the prospect of celebrating Halloween for the first time. What else did Americans do on Halloween? I remembered something about candy. I’d have to look up the customs. But decorating! Decorating was first. Decorating my dorm room for Christmas was my only real experience with the concept, but the idea loomed tantalizingly ahead. I could cover my whole house with lights!  
Not paying attention, I slammed into a child who had stepped out of an alley in front of me. Although most of his outfit was pretty tattered and dirty, he wore a high-tech looking helmet which went flying when we collided. I managed to react fast enough to catch it before it hit the ground. “Sorry,” I stooped and handed him the helmet, “I guess I should pay more attention to where I’m walking, shouldn’t I?” I didn’t think much of the weird-looking helmet; I remembered something about children dressing up around Halloween and just figured that he was in costume.   
I thought the boy must have something wrong with him when he stared at me like I had three heads. “Wow...You’re kinda like me, mister. I never met anyone like me before. You think interesting things too, but you don’t really realize it. Does your head hurt when you think?”  
I frowned at him. “What?” Yup, something was probably wrong with the kid. Or he was playing some kind of game. I wasn’t very good with kids except my sister, and that was probably because she’d grown up around so many adults. But I did tend to have headaches. A lot of people had headaches. He was probably just guessing or something.   
He smiled and put his strange hat back on. “You’re silly; you don’t believe the things you think, but you listen to them anyway. You should probably stop going towards the most exciting possibilities, there’s a lot of exciting out there and most of it isn’t very good. I try to stay away from stuff like that.” He looked across the street where a parking cop was waving him over. The guy looked pretty benign and the kid seemed to know him, so I guessed that might be his father. “You should probably listen to those thoughts a bit more; bad things are coming. Watch out for bulls and bears and you should find the burned man.” He waved goodbye and rushed across the street where the officer crouched to talk to him.   
I stood and tried not to stare. Okay, that had been about as much crazy as I could handle in a day, but at least it was a nice kid. I hoped the cop would look after him, maybe get him a good psychiatrist. Although some of the things he’d said did seem a little...eerie. I did tend to feel like I somehow aimed myself towards danger most of the time. And I remembered often dreaming events just before they happened. But lots of people did that, right? It was just probability. There was no way this kid could know that about me.   
I picked up as many decorations as I could carry at the store and did my best to figure out the customs I couldn’t remember from the products around me. Candy was definitely involved and I liked candy anyway; I got ten bags. I contemplated how I’d set everything up as I headed back up the hill, but that wasn’t quite enough to render me oblivious to what I saw as I walked. One of the buildings which had looked closed most of the previous times I’d gone by was now in the process of being lit up. Two pretty hot guys were working to run a string of orange and purple lights around the already illuminated business sign that read “The Red Beret.” They both wore pretty average looking work clothes aside from a crimson beret perched on each of their heads. A neon effigy of the titular hat rested jauntily on one side of the sign, making the placement of the decorative lights somewhat difficult. The men were arguing about the decorations as I walked past. Up on a ladder with the light string, the smaller of the two asked his burly companion, “Should we turn the cord around at the beret, or just run the lights all the way around the sign?”  
When the other man, who stood below him holding the coils of lights yet to be strung up, shrugged and stared grumpily up at him, the man on the ladder sighed. “Boone, I get it, but can’t you at least pretend to be happy? Or even not quite so pissed off?”  
The man below scowled at him. “No.”  
The man on the ladder sighed in exasperation and went back to work. I was out of earshot before they said anything more.   
I read up on Halloween customs before decorating, but that didn’t take too long. It was evening when I went out to set up the lights. With my porch light and my generally good night vision, I could see well enough to set everything up even as the light shifted to a dim orange. There had been black cat decorations and I’d gotten a huge one to put in my tiny yard. Stringing the lights got a bit boring, so I brought out my speakers and music and let it play. I didn’t set it to any specific playlist, so the song transitioned from Rammstein to James Taylor to Young Dubliners to Van Halen. By the time it hit the Elvis version of “Promised Land” I was both aware that the stairs were completely devoid of other people and energetically into the music. I started singing along under my breath as I strung the lights and that evolved into an enthusiastic and— I liked to think— well done imitation of Elvis’s voice. My speaking voice wasn’t exactly deep, not that it was as high-pitched as Vulpes’, but I had a wide enough vocal range that I could easily mimic most other voices. Around the second verse, I heard a soft clatter of metal on the steps behind me.   
The light of the decorations I had already set up as well as the glow of my porch light illuminated a handsome canine face peering over the iron gate of my yard. Rex barked once and then whined, as if asking to be let in.   
He didn’t flee when I approached him and he didn’t growl when I carried him up the stairs to my front door. He investigated the main floor of my house before settling down on the thickest of the rugs to rest. A quick sequence of cab rides got me everything I needed to care for the dog and within a day he looked as comfortable in my creepy home as if he’d lived there his whole life. He seemed to like Elvis music, for some reason, so, having no real preference at the moment, I let it play non-stop.   
The dog took to me as well as any dog I had ever owned, if not better. I had always been more of a curiosity to my family’s dogs than a master. They checked in on me when no one else was doing anything exciting, or when they were particularly puzzled by the sounds of my actions. Rex, on the other hand, tailed me constantly once I took him in and fed him. The stairs presented a problem, one that was solved at times by me carrying him and at times by his own determination to follow me regardless of the obstacles he might face in the process. I soon became so accustomed to my furry shadow that I sometimes forgot he was there.   
I got back into my art addictions for a while, neglecting my own needs once again. I hate to admit it, but I would probably have forgotten to tend to Rex as well if the dog hadn’t barked to remind me. For the next three days I lived much as I had the previous four while I kept my dog surprisingly well cared for. I guess my mother had been wrong, in a way: I could take care of a living thing, just as long as that living thing wasn’t myself.   
I passed out from exhaustion at some point soon after getting Rex settled in and woke to a cacophony of barking. The barking ceased abruptly as I groaned and looked around. I’d fallen asleep in my dark living room this time and my laptop lay open on my table with the carved stone horse resting beside it. Rex stood near the stairs, tail between his legs and whining as he backed towards me. Something had him terrified; I could see him shaking from where I sat, even in the dim light. It seemed a credit to the dog’s courage that he stayed beside me and didn’t flee even as the object of his fear, Vulpes Inculta, stalked into my living room. Everything about the man just seemed predatory; I wasn’t surprised that he seemed to frighten animals as easily as I befriended them. At least most of them.   
“I’m starting to think that you don’t like using doors,” I remarked jokingly and worried as soon as the words left my lips that too much humor might accidentally provoke him. Granted, by no means was I averse to more painful sex that I wasn’t sure I had consented to, but the last thing I needed was to run into Arcade on another trip to the ER. Besides, I wasn’t sure my body had really recovered enough to handle that again.   
“Would you have been awake to answer if I had knocked?” He had a point. My hair was matted and partly stuck to my face, so I figured that he could tell I’d just woken up and he gave me no chance to reply anyway. “I have a request for you, a...favor, I suppose you would call it.”  
“Another one? I painted you something, by the way. It’s upstairs. It might be dry by now, but I haven’t checked.” He gave me a curious look so I offered, “I can go up and show you, if you want. If it’s dry, you can just take it now...”   
“I cannot. I have somewhere to be. This will be a brief visit and I cannot bring a painting with me to my next destination. However, I would like to see it now.” He sounded more serious than before, or maybe more annoyed. I had never met anyone who hid their emotions so completely. I doubted he’d tell me where he was headed even if I asked and that last statement sounded more like an order than a request.   
“Okay.” I got up and headed upstairs, leading him into the studio. Rex stopped at the bottom of the stairs with a whine, but I didn’t want to encourage him to come up here with Vulpes around. On the off-chance that he found time to get sexual, I’d rather not have a dog watching us. A part of me also felt like he might kill Rex if the dog annoyed him and I wasn’t keen on the idea of losing my new companion. Even so, Rex clattered his way up the stairs while I let Vulpes study the painting. I felt like it was one of my best works, but that often happened when I painted something inspired by people I was attracted to.   
* * *  
The painting was interesting and even more detailed than his other works nearby. I glanced at them but paid the most attention to the one he claimed to have painted for me. Beyond the suggestion that he could be easily manipulated to serve the Legion so long as I remained in charge of such manipulation, I put little thought into the significance of the gesture. Granted, no one had ever painted anything for me before, let alone something to this degree of skill, but I had asked him for it as a test of his willingness to cooperate. Also to stop coworkers from remarking annoyingly on the blank state of my office walls. I didn’t care to spend money on art for the place and the things I came by freely either did not appeal to me or were not the sort of things I could legally display in my office. As the only place where I rarely dealt with my Legion comrades, I kept the more sentimental of my possessions at the office of my cover persona, the journalist Todd Acerbi. Although they all looked innocuous, most of the objects I kept for sentimental reasons were souvenirs of my exploits with the Legion. A desire for a similar memento of this unique dealing with Jack had also spurred my request for a painting. And I could hardly have imagined a more appropriate end result for the work.   
Although it was unframed, the canvas would not have seemed out of place in a museum. The image extended to the edges, in some places they were even as textured as the front of the work. Unlike most of his paintings, he concealed the more abstract aspects and the result was a nearly photorealistic image, although he had intensified some hues and details here and there. Simply put, the painting showed a fox drinking from a stream. The scene was winter and the fox stood in a snowy forest with the bare trees looking almost like cracks against the pale snow and sky. The bleak winter landscape might have seemed almost desolate, particularly given the cloudy gray sky above, but I found a stark beauty in such scenery. To the casual observer, the stream would seem to be nothing more than a spectacularly accurate representation, but having seen Jack’s other works, especially the lion, I noticed the faint suggestion of a skull reflected in the water below the fox. That seemed to be a signature of his. The fox itself looked up at the viewer with an intense and confident stare in its silver eyes. This was, in a way, a portrait, I realized; he had painted the fox in such a way that it resembled myself. This was not simply in eye color and expression, but also in the shape of the face. It was a Tibetan fox, I had seen enough of them to recognize the species, but the bone structure had been slightly altered as had the shade of the fur on the top of the head. One had to look closely, I felt, but the fox clearly resembled me.   
* * *  
Vulpes smiled just a tiny bit, so subtly that I could barely see the expression. “Interesting.”  
Okay, that wasn’t exactly a response I had expected. I don’t really know what I had expected the man to say. Was interesting good or bad? Hopefully good. He’d probably just kill me if it wasn’t, although I was starting to wonder about that. Maybe he wasn’t quite as homicidal as he seemed. That was probably wishful thinking.   
I wanted to ask if `interesting’ meant that he liked it, but I didn’t get a chance as he changed subjects abruptly and blasted all thought of my art from my mind.   
“I would like you to join me four days from now on the thirtieth of October for a party I am expected to attend.”  
He said that so blankly and abruptly that I just gaped for a moment. “...What?”  
“The Chronicle is having a Halloween party and all journalists, including myself, are expected to attend. We are allowed, if not expected to bring...companions.”  
I stared blankly, struggling to process the massive improbability of that. Was this...was he asking me on a date? “Um... The thirtieth? ...What?”  
* * *  
Why was he so surprised by this? Jack’s apparent confusion irritated me. I had little time to stop by and technically this was not something I should be asking of him, but I saw more risk to my Legion activities by continuing to have so many annoying female coworkers trying in vain to pursue me sexually. Taking Jack to the party in what they would likely perceive as a date should convince them to leave me alone at last. And having Jack with me would hopefully make the antics of my drunk coworkers less insufferable. I had never had much tolerance for drunks and the only thing the other journalists and secretaries seemed to seek more than new stories was booze. I knew from his medical history that Jack could not drink alcohol and I abhorred it for the dulling effect it had on my senses and cunning. Hopefully having another person at the party who refused the abundant liquor would make my own abstinence less remarkable. Inviting Jack offered one further bonus by potentially increasing his attraction and loyalty to me, and, subsequently, to the Legion. In fact, the only downside I saw to this plan was the fact that Caesar would almost certainly disapprove if it came to light. As long as this party was not made known to him, inviting Jack only aided the Legion and caused us no harm at all. Between Jack’s apparently reclusive lifestyle (I knew he had only left his house once in the past several days and made no phone calls,) my coworker’s tendency to drink massively and forget such details as names, and my own possibly unparalleled ability to keep secrets, I saw little likelihood that my decision would ever come to Caesar’s knowledge.   
* * *  
“It is a costume party, as is customary. I apologize in advance for the likely behavior of my coworkers. I would greatly prefer to avoid them whilst they are under the influence of copious quantities of alcohol and sugar, but perhaps with your company they will be tolerable. You will join me, then?”   
I puzzled over that explanation. Was he saying he liked my company or just that I was marginally preferable to a room full of boisterous drunks? Either way, I knew my answer. “Sure.”  
“Good. I will pick you up at seven pm precisely. Be ready when I arrive. You can give me the painting at that time and we can drop it off in my office on our way to the party. I will see you then.” He stalked back through the curtain and I heard the painting close in the bathroom. How did that open, anyway?  
I walked across the tile, hearing Rex clatter along behind me, and felt the edges of the frame for a handle or switch. Nothing. There was no obvious button around in the bathroom itself, either. Finding no way of opening the hidden door and exploring the rest of the house I owned, I resigned myself back to my art and writing.   
My heart was pounding at the prospect of what might be a date. The man was absolutely gorgeous, deadly like a giant crocodile, but damn sexy. Somehow that danger made him more appealing. I still liked the idea of Arcade, but man, Vulpes was exhilarating. Arcade seemed to be a dead end now, but I had to admit that I mourned the prospect of being with him. Admittedly, my judgement in relationships had been notoriously bad so far, but the men seemed like a rocket and a sturdy galleon. The one was very fast and could take me to new heights of pleasure, but there was also that ever-present chance that he’d explode and destroy me as well as the doubt that I would never be able to come back from him. On the other hand, if I still had any chance to pursue something with Arcade, I felt that it would be stable, safe, and enjoyable, but not to the extremes of Vulpes. They both calmed the tension that had gnawed my insides since that crash when I’d been twelve, but they did so in different ways, with different subtle changes to my outlook. I sensed that, if I could be with Arcade, I could be a good person however immoral my preferences, pleasures, and profession might make me feel. On the other hand, I knew that if I pursued a relationship with Vulpes exclusively, I would stop caring about ethics entirely. In a way, that freedom could be wonderful. It could finally relieve me of the guilt and uncertainty that had plagued me for years. Maybe, at the time, I knew more about the future than I realized.   
For the next hour I found myself distracted by musings of what I should dress as for this costume party. I had only been to one costume party before and that was in college. I suppose it was much the same thing, although I didn’t exactly feel like resurrecting the skin-tight black cat costume I’d made myself back then. With my self control, that hadn’t gone too well the first time, and I’d rather not deal with drunks playing with my tail again. But beyond the restrictions of being looser than spandex and lacking a tail, I found myself completely stumped. I had a few days, I reasoned, I could wait for a good idea in that time. I was so sure that I’d have one.   
Having put off the costume conundrum and the mysterious bull door, my addiction to art again consumed me. I went without sleep for over a day and neglected my other basic needs almost as severely.


	12. Telephone Line

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song of the same name by ELO. Not sure if it's clear, so I'll clarify: the narrator of this chapter is Arcade; the break of ~ is a time break and not a shift in perspective.

* * *  
As it turned out, I _had_ needed to take more than a day or two off, but that was less because of the concussion and more because of everything else. Without a car, buying a new one had become even more of a hassle and I probably paid to much for the one that I finally got. I was just glad to be done dealing with the salesman at the time. More problematic was my sudden lack of an apartment. Nothing had actually been damaged, thank god, but the fire had weakened the building enough that it had to be condemned, leaving me currently living in a hotel nearby. I tried not to feel quite as annoyed as I was because I knew that most of the other families probably couldn’t afford a new home, whereas I just hated dealing with the whole apartment-searching process almost as much as I hated buying cars. It didn’t help that the hospital had been under its worst strain in years while I needed to take the time off to get my life back under control. Somehow the funding had lessened so dramatically that not only did the budget barely allow us to provide basic care, but we’d gone into debt overall trying to keep enough beds for our number of patients. To make matters worse, the city seemed to be going to hell, although I didn’t want to believe that. Since the bombing of the ferry and aircraft carrier, the massive accident that Jack and I had been in, and the hotel bombing I’d heard about later, there had been a massive rise in dog attacks, twelve freak accidents involving cable cars, trolleys, and busses, five plane crashes, sixteen attacks that got labeled as muggings, and twenty shootings. There was also a huge increase in the numbers of murders, arsons, and missing persons reports state-wide, and only a handful of the cases had been resolved. Something really big was happening, and I really didn’t want my morality to drag me into it right now, as selfish as I knew that was. It bothered me deeply that I didn’t want to try to help, but I knew that I simply didn’t have the resources to manage it. I needed to get a handle on my own life before I’d be any use to anyone.  
  
Even if I couldn’t help on the large scale, I could do my best to help in my work, I was a doctor, after all. As soon as I had a car, a hotel room, and a decent amount of sleep, I returned to the hospital.  
  
That first night of work hit me like a ton of bricks. Another bombing during the day had us managing several dozen patients on the edge of death. At least one of them would code every ten minutes, but I guess they were just lucky to have survived the initial blast. Since I’d started my shift, we’d lost five of them: an old woman, a middle-aged man, a teenaged girl and her twin brother, and a seven year old boy. That kind of thing always made me a bit depressed and it didn’t help that I was starting to feel kind of helpless with everything going wrong in the city.  
  
Recognizing and struggling to mask my emotions after the death of the boy, I chose that moment to take my break and eat what passed for lunch with my strange sleep and work schedule. It was roughly midnight, which was when I usually ate my second meal of the day on the nights I worked. Luckily I had found myself surprisingly adaptable to having ridiculous living schedules. I got some kind of sandwich that had bacon in it and ate while I chipped away at my endless mountain of paperwork, oblivious to any taste that the meal might have had. We didn’t really have offices, per say, so I worked and ate in what was more of a corridor of desks and file cabinets than an office. Counters and more of the desks gave the place the illusion of being separate from the hallway, but we were pretty much out in the open. Luckily, I suppose, it was the ICU, so we couldn’t be gawked at or bothered by concerned relatives who somehow felt that doctors didn’t have paperwork, or other patients, or biological needs and should devote every moment of their lives to whichever patient the loved one happened to be visiting. I liked helping patients, but dealing with relatives like that got annoying really fast.  
  
After the seven-year-old, two of our interns had completely broken down and the nurses had taken them away to try and calm them, leaving me and Julie alone at the station. Julie and I rarely happened to take our breaks at the same time, but I guess the loss of the child had bothered her as well, because she had stopped to have a salad. Most of us worked through our meals, except for the less-serious interns, so I wasn’t surprised when she did some paperwork and then made some calls. She rushed about, clacking her low-heeled shoes across the tile floor as she searched and sorted files, prescriptions, and papers from all ends of the little doctor corral. With the hospital being so busy all the time, the woman never seemed to sit down, even while eating.  
  
That was why it surprised me so much when she dropped suddenly into one of the chairs. It rolled back and hit the desk behind her as I turned around, but she didn’t seem to notice. She had the phone up to her ear and a look of shock on her face. I had to swallow my current bite of sandwich before I could say anything to her and in the meantime, she finished her phone call.  
  
“R-right. Well, um, that’s...good to hear. Thank you, have a nice day...” She hung up, looking amazed. No, amazed wasn’t the right word for it, that was awe. That was the kind of look patients got when we told them their cancer was in remission, or somebody had invented a cure for their terminal illness. She noticed my raised eyebrows and curious stare before I could swallow and speak.  
  
“Somebody...” Julie had to take a moment to gather her thoughts before she could say it and when she did I briefly choked on my sandwich and spent several minutes coughing before I could speak again. “Somebody anonymously donated five hundred million dollars to the hospital.”  
  
Coughing fit ensued. “What?! Wait a second, did we treat Bill Gates recently or something?”  
  
Julie laughed that quiet chuckle that people got when they were too surprised to do more. “No. I...I really have no idea who could have done this... But it’s a godsend. We’ve been..we’ve been more in debt than I’ve let on, I’m sorry to say, and this...this probably saved the hospital.”  
  
I stared. “We were that bad off? Really?” She nodded. I guess it didn’t surprise me too much, now that I thought about it, but I’d always believed that somehow the hospital’s funding issues would never get that bad. “Wow. ...$500 million dollars... _damn_...”  
  
“I know. I didn’t really believe it when I got the check; I thought it was just a joke somebody did, or a well-meaning psychiatric patient, but the money came through, that was the bank, just now...”  
  
“Wow...” We both sat there in stunned silence until somebody coded and the alarm went off along the hallway.  
  
Julie got up first. “I’ll get that, I need to go tell Emily and the other doctors about this anyway.” She rushed off and I took a long moment to contemplate the many things this donation could mean before going back to the paperwork.  
  
Hopefully this donation might at least help the pen situation, I thought in mild amusement as another of my pens ran out of ink. Somehow my pocket was currently empty, so I sought alternative writing impliments and had to rummage through some of the forms that Julie had abandoned in her distraction from the phone call. A name caught my eye as Julie returned.  
  
“Jack came into the hospital again?”  
  
She froze, staring at me like a startled doe. Julie had to be the worst liar I had ever met and that rule extended to when she was just trying to conceal things. She had that evasive look now. “Yes. Give me that file, please.” Technically, she was still my boss, so I handed over the papers, but I frowned at her.  
  
“Julie, why are you being so secretive about this?” She put the file away and glanced at me awkwardly.  
  
The woman knew she couldn’t lie, so she admitted quietly, “He asked me not to tell you.”  
  
Now that worried me. My mind instantly went to the worst case scenarios. Maybe he’d gotten in another car accident. Maybe he had cancer. Maybe he was terminal. What was it that he didn’t want me to know? And why?  
  
I guess my horror must have showed, because Julie comforted, “He isn’t terminal.”  
  
I frowned and tilted my head. I wanted to ask, but I knew she wouldn’t answer. Part of me wanted to find and check Jack’s file, but I realized the ethics involved. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t let myself do that. Deep down, I realized that I had no real right to know. I wasn’t even technically dating him, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d puzzled over that conundrum since the fire and still hadn’t made up my mind. I really wanted to date him. Emotionally, I knew that I wanted to be with him, but he was so...immature sometimes, and between his fragile emotions, psychological trauma, and the way he seemed to jinx everything around him, I wasn’t sure I could handle getting involved with Jack. He’d probably be the death of me.  
  
I shouldn’t be so hurt that he wanted to hide his medical history from me. The only reason I had access to it in the first place was because I happened to be a doctor; most people didn’t have that kind of knowledge of potential boyfriends. I tried to let it go, as curious as I was. Julie looked sympathetic, but said nothing. She filed the papers and sorted out a few more things before heading away to make rounds checking on the patients. I got back to work as the nurses returned, sans one intern. They didn’t seem to notice anything strange about my mood or Julie’s— she apparently forgot to tell them about the anonymous donation.  
  
As much as I tried to focus on the patients, my thoughts kept turning back to Jack. I wanted to see him again.  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
Jack had been drifting into my thoughts more and more lately, and in the next few days I caught myself thinking about him even more often. Daisy had, of course called me already and given me a piece of her mind about Jack. It wasn’t just his youth, or even the age-old lamentation about how I’d never give her “grandkids”; she seemed unusually paranoid about him and when I asked why she referenced his way of stirring up trouble, an oddly military phrase he’d once used, and the enduring sense that he was far more intelligent than his immaturity, attitude, and general obliviousness suggested. The first reason was obvious, but it hardly seemed to be intentional, and I wasn’t really in a position to criticize someone for bad luck and circumstances. As for his unlikely knowledge, I had noticed this as well: it was one of the reasons I hadn’t completely denied the possibility of having a relationship with him. I didn’t want to believe that it was strange. Only the military phrasing she referenced disturbed me. I hadn’t noticed that. Jack really didn’t seem remotely military, and I couldn’t tell if he was old enough to have been in the service at all, but if he had a military background he might be even more dangerous than I had realized. If he was military, I probably couldn’t risk dating him, less for my own sake and more because that could endanger the only family I really had. The idea chilled me. I’d have to try to find out why he knew those phrases. If he was military... If he was military, I probably couldn’t risk it. That would make my decision for me. Otherwise...otherwise I still wasn’t sure. I would have to decide...eventually.  
  
That call only added to all the other reasons my thoughts kept drifting back to Jack like stubborn homing pigeons. I started hoping he’d call and wanting to call him myself, but when I picked up my phone with that intention, I always found that I couldn’t think of what I’d say. It had been five days, six days, a full week since I’d last seen him, and if he hadn’t called me yet, was he even still interested? Granted, we hadn’t left on the clearest terms. Maybe he’d picked up more of my intent at the start of that conversation than I had realized. Maybe that flattery and philosophy had been intended to manipulate me into dropping the subject? I rejected the notion. Jack simply wasn’t like that; he was naive, and brilliant, and wholly moral, whatever idiotic notions his lack of experience led him to believe. He didn’t use people even if he was smart enough to know how, and he certainly hadn’t played me so shamelessly. But he might have realized what I’d been planning to say after the fact, and maybe that was why he hadn’t called. Maybe he thought there wasn’t or couldn’t be anything between us and had moved on? Now that was something I simply didn’t want to believe. My luck was going terribly enough that I’d rather just imagine that he might still have feelings for me and something else was keeping him from calling. Maybe his phone had broken. He seemed like he might not fix such a thing immediately. More likely, maybe he just didn’t know what to say either? I set myself an ultimatum: once I figured out if I should take the chance and date him or not, I’d call if he hadn’t already called me, and that would settle the whole phone debate.  
  
As it turned out, I never got to that point. The idea that Jack might call me had slowly become a pestering hope at the back of my mind, constantly present and mildly distracting, so when my phone rang as I was getting home from work one morning, I dove to answer it.  
  
I read the name on the screen. Daisy. Please, god, not another rant... “Hello?”  
  
I anticipated a tone of her usual motherly condescension, but I got something closer to an apology than I had ever heard from her, and it was all the more shocking by being unbidden. I had expected her to disapprove of Jack, so I hadn’t even seen the need of an apology, even considering Daisy’s formidable ability to rant.  
  
“Arcade? Well...I’ll get straight to the point. Jack doesn’t seem to have left his house in a few days and we’re starting to get a bit worried over here. Veronica tried to check on him, but he didn’t answer the door and she didn’t hear anything but a barking dog inside.”  
  
“A dog?” That distracted me for a moment.  
  
“Yeah, apparently he got that one with the cart. It goes in and out on its own sometimes, but I haven’t seen him. I guess the dog can open the door, or something—”  
  
“Wait a second, you haven’t seen Jack in _days_? And he hasn’t answered his door?” I mean, granted, I guess I didn’t really know him all that well, even though, for some reason, I felt like I did, but that just...that worried me. A lot. Especially with him having been to the hospital in the past few days for something he didn’t want me to know about. Well, considering he was a prostitute, I suppose I could guess what that probably was, but on the other hand, if it wasn’t the obvious...  
Daisy had answered with some mildly annoyed remark about how overly worried I sounded, but I hadn’t paid much attention and I could tell that she was a bit concerned herself.  
  
I wanted to drive over there right now and check on him, but I stopped myself. I had to be rational. He was probably just... Just what? People didn’t just become hermits for days without warning. I tried to think of some rational explanation without jumping to worst case scenarios or absurdities. Maybe he found a good show on Netflix. Okay, maybe, but that still seemed odd. He only had one TV in his house and he didn’t seem like he had much interest in that. Granted, we hadn’t really discussed television, so maybe he _had_ just been watching a whole series or something. But that just seemed unlikely, for some reason.  
  
I thought of a more likely possibility. It was flu season. Maybe he was just sick. That would explain not answering the door and not leaving his house; if he wasn’t feeling well, he was probably sleeping in his bed most of the time and might not even have heard the doorbell. On the other hand, people did sometimes die from the flu. And he had just been to the hospital. It could be something worse, one of the dozens of antibiotic-resistant diseases that filled such places. Okay, that was getting paranoid again. It was probably a cold. Or the flu, but not a really really bad case. Hopefully. Probably. I could call him. If he answered, at least I could reassure myself that he was not lying dead somewhere in that already creepy house, probably joining the corpse of the previous owner which was surely stowed away chopped up in the walls somewhere and adding to their crimson hues. And that gave me an excuse to call him. That was a hell of an excuse, I realized. `Hi, I’m calling because your neighbor who’s practically my mother has been watching your house with such paranoid intensity that she knows you haven’t left in days and now she’s told me, so I just want to make sure you aren’t dead or dying.’ Lovely way to possibly start or continue a romance. I’d have to find a better way of phrasing that.  
  
Daisy had continued talking, but I interupted her suddenly. “I’ll call and check on him.”  
  
“Well! Just cut me off mid-sentence, why don’t ya? Where have your manners gotten to, anyway?!” She was getting wound up again. This was not a good time for that.  
  
Apologies were always the best way of dealing with her. “Sorry, Daisy, I just...I’m really worried about him. I’d like to call him right now, okay?”  
  
There was silence on the other end of the line and I could almost feel her fighting the desire to fly into another tirade. “Alright. Call him. But you’d better have some courtesy next time we talk!” She hung up and I sighed, struggling to stay calm and come up with a less disturbing reason to call Jack. As it turned out, he never asked for a reason.


	13. All The Small Things

* * *  
As with the previous several days, I put off sleep until I collapsed while working. At the moment, my well of writing ideas had dried up, so I ended up on the painfully hard wooden floor of my painting studio below a canvas that had probably dried days ago and an equally dry palette on the table above me. As so many of my dreams were nightmares and as I so rarely slept, it didn’t surprise me when my jarring ringtone of grim metalcore jolted me from a particularly vivid nightmare that I suspected would have awakened any normal person. I had to lay very still on my back until my heart stopped trying to smash its way out of my ribs. I only typically remembered memory dreams in their entirety, so all I retained of this dream was a vague sense that a restaurant had exploded. For once, that didn’t make me eager to go to a restaurant to see if it would blow up. I guess that kid the other day had really started to change the way I looked at all these uncanny dreams I had.  
  
My phone kept ringing and I realized that this was a call and not a text or one of those annoying alarms I set for myself when I felt particularly optimistic about my ability to be a decently productive human being. I had slept through my classes nine times out of ten in college for precisely this reason.  
  
But phone calls were different, I thought, sitting up on the floor. I eyed the edge of my phone just visible over the high table as if it was a mountain to climb. I had never been a morning person. And I was still in enough pain that I probably needed to take another dose of all the medicines I’d been prescribed. Who on earth was calling me anyway? I had three contacts listed on this phone and one was my voice mail. I guess that narrowed it down. Unless this was a telemarketer.  
  
Groggily, I swiped the phone off the table like a drugged cat and pawed it up to my ear. Oh. Right. I needed to actually hit the button to answer it. “Hello?” I sounded stoned. Extremely Scottish, and stoned. Sleeping on a hardwood floor did not make for a restful night and I felt like I could use a few days more sleep at the moment.  
  
“Jack? Are you okay?” It was Arcade. His concern stirred some level of coherence to my brain and I managed to lose most of my accent by the time I replied.  
  
“Yeah. I’m fine. Just woke up.” I yawned halfway through that sentence and managed to stand up. As often happened when I was left to my own devices, I’d stopped caring about clothing, and thus I wore only boxers, slippers, and socks, all of which I’d been wearing for the better part of the past week. I had at least cleaned and made the bed, although I hadn’t actually slept in it at all in that time. Where were my pants?  
  
“After what, an hour? You sound more exhausted than I am.” I could tell that the laughter in his voice was mostly relief that I was okay and that caught me completely off-guard. It wasn’t like I’d never had people who cared about me, but I’d sort of lost them recently, and finding that he apparently cared enough to worry about me at all stirred a hell of a lot of emotions. I felt a little confused; he had only known me a week or so, and I wasn’t sure exactly where we stood in terms of relationship status. I wasn’t even sure how well we knew each other. I also found myself a bit disturbed that he cared so much. I still wasn’t sure that I could ever find someone except perhaps Vulpes who could accept my morality, or apparent lack thereof, and the last thing I needed right now was yet another person I cared about getting set up for me to disappoint them just by being myself. I really didn’t need another reason to feel like I made everyone around me miserable however much I tried not to. I had the damned Midas Touch of suffering. Granted, I thought, rubbing my aching broken arm, I wasn’t exempt from that effect myself.  
  
But the thing was, despite all the fear it awakened inside me, I also really liked the idea that he might care about me so much. I still really liked him and I still wanted to be with him, maybe even more than with Vulpes, although that was mostly because I didn’t think I had to worry about Arcade killing me at the slightest provocation. I still felt like everything I was could be setting this relationship up for disaster, but heck, I’d taken many worse chances. I’d wandered the bad neighborhoods of Bejing alone, I could do this. Still made me feel guilty for risking his feelings, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.  
  
I nearly forgot his question and realized that I had no idea how long I had slept. Sometimes, when I got addicted to my muse, I slept for several days straight. It was rare, but I had once slept over ninety-six hours after going without sleep for almost that long. “What day is it?”  
  
He sighed and laughed a little more, “It’s the twenty-ninth, Rip Van Winkle. How long did you sleep?”  
  
His good mood was contagious. I chuckled and did the math. “Only twenty hours, surprisingly. I thought it might be longer.” I went looking for the rest of my clothes and found them on the floor of my bedroom, in one of the three piles I used to separate various stages of dirty clothes. Living alone, foxy intrusions and dog aside, I didn’t really care to buy a laundry basket or similar place to keep them. Rex apparently applauded that decision as all three piles showed clear evidence of having become dog beds and as each was a slightly different size, Rex seemed to vary between them based on his current preferences for fabric or comfort. At the moment, he lay on top of my discarded pants, smiling contentedly up at me. “Rex, as much as I know you enjoy covering my pants in dog hair, I’d really appreciate if you would find a bed that wasn’t my clothing.”  
  
“What?” I’d forgotten that I was on the phone for a moment— I didn’t take phone calls often. Arcade sounded amused and I wasn’t sure if I cursed myself for saying that out loud or applauded the way he made me feel so comfortable fumbling through waking up while talking to him. I normally hated people until I got around to that first cup of tea.  
  
“Sorry, dog’s on my wardrobe.” I shifted Rex from the pile and he chose the one beside it, watching me as if in mild amusement at the futility of that move while I shook off my pants and got dressed. I should probably shower. And maybe find clean clothes.  
  
“So I surmised. You often sleep twenty hours straight?”  
  
“Eh, sometimes.” I added further explanation before I could stop myself. Curse being slow to wake up. “I tend to forget to sleep when left to my own devices.”  
  
And that concern was back in his voice with a heavy dose of humor. “You know, it’s probably best if you stop doing that. Sleep’s not actually a bad thing.”  
  
I snorted. “Nor is eating and so forth, but I get really caught up in the things I do instead.” Damn. I shouldn’t have said that. Now he was really going to worry about me.  
  
I took the silence on the other end of the line to be confusion, but it could just as easily have been curiosity. Perhaps he was wondering what it was that I did instead of eating and sleeping. He probably thought it involved drugs. Maybe not, but that seemed most likely. I felt compelled to explain.  
  
“I paint. A lot. I get really into it.”  
  
“Uh-huh.” That voice was just dripping with skepticism. I’d even almost told the truth and he didn’t believe me. Maybe this was going to be a worse idea than I had thought. I definitely wasn’t telling him about the writing this early on.  
  
When the awkward silence started to near the minute mark, he let it go, probably realizing that I couldn’t be swayed by anything he could do over the phone. He sighed. “Look, exactly how long have you gone without eating? Do you actually have food in your house right now or have you just been living off what was there a week ago?” There hadn’t been much in my fridge; he was right. I had sherbet. And about a cup of frozen corn. And whatever was left of that sausage I’d gnawed a few times in the week. I guess it could technically be a meal...  
  
“Probably...about a day and a half? And yeah, pretty much. I think I have about a dinner left...maybe...but that’s mostly sherbet.”  
  
Again he sighed. “You’ve been living off sherbet and lunch meats for the past week?”  
  
“Pretty much.”  
  
“God damn it.” He paused for a long while, and I still wasn’t awake enough to even guess what he was thinking about. Mostly, I spent the time focused on realizing there were still bloodstains in the bathroom and trying to clean them up with my free hand, which was also the one attached to my broken arm. It wasn’t a very successful effort.  
  
“Alright, look, how about I stop by and we either go somewhere for dinner or get you some actual groceries and cook something?” Oh. So that was what he’d been thinking about. I paused, kneeling on my bathroom floor. Was this a date? Was this something Americans did as friends? Was this some kind of altruistic gesture because he realized that, honestly, I did a terrible job of keeping myself alive? In the last case, my reaction was somewhere between resentment and gratitude. I didn’t want to be seen as a child any longer, but I recognized that I was still, and maybe always would be, incompetent as an adult. I hated that about myself almost more than I hated how much suffering I always seemed to cause. I hoped that wasn’t the reason. He had paused. Maybe that meant it was more significant. Like a date.  
  
“Um...so....what do you think?” I could hear the trepidation in his reply and realized that he probably had meant it as a date, and now he was worried that I was awkward about that, or didn’t want that kind of relationship.  
  
“Sorry. That just...caught me off guard. That sounds great.” I should add something optimistic. What did people say that was optimistic when people suggested stuff like that? “I look forward to seeing you.” God damn, I sounded like my grandmother. Spoken like a true pensioner. Worst acceptance of a date ever.  
  
* * *  
  
My mood fluctuated between nervous and excited as I drove up to that same parking lot by the stairs. Jack was so...complicated. I knew this relationship was probably a bad idea, on the one hand, but on the other...on the other I really wanted it. And, at the very least, I couldn’t knowingly let him starve himself and live the way he seemed to be living. I recognized that he might have been playing me, but I doubted it. He’d sounded awful, and even though he’d just woken up I wanted to believe that he really did go without food and sleep for days, although the painting excuse felt like a lie. I suspected something more along the lines of drugs or some kind of psychiatric disorder, probably the latter given his thing about painkillers. I had to at least keep enough of an eye on him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself any further. Hell, maybe he’d gone to the hospital for something to do with this. Maybe he was anorexic or something, although he really didn’t seem the type. I had to help him, and while I was doing that...  
  
Well, at the very least it would be easier to help him if I was dating him, not that I hadn’t really had to fight myself to avoid just dating him from the start, and not that I still didn’t think that this would probably end in disaster. I already knew that life with Jack was bound to be eventful, and as much as that scared me, I found that it also...excited me, a little. Okay, a lot, but that was more because not all eventful was necessarily bad. There would probably be more bad than good, but the man just seemed to bring about serendipity and I already figured that any relationship with him was going to be a whole lot of good along with all the bad. True, that bad had thus far turned out to be a near-constant risk of life and limb, but somehow that didn’t seem like quite enough to outweigh how wonderful Jack could be. Thinking about him brought to mind that smile he’d given me on the stairs. For all his trauma, for all his secrets, for all his crazy, dangerous twists of fate, he had the kind of smile that just made everything seem alright. Even when it wasn’t, not even remotely. But right now didn’t seem to be one of those times. Right now, things actually seemed to be looking up, for a change.  
  
Jack had decorated for Halloween and aside from the odd giant black cat his house had ended up looking like the cover of some decorating magazine. A strange one, admittedly, given the bizarre vaguely roman/southwestern design of the house, but even so. The decorations looked professionally done, but I guess he was a painter, so he must have some sense of taste even if his clothing and the generally creepy look of the home’s interior hadn’t really suggested that.  
  
Ringing the doorbell brought about a cacophony of barking followed by a thunderous metallic clatter and then a faint squeaking and the clicking of canine claws as the barking got nearer to the door. I guess he really had adopted Rex. And, as it turned out, the dog could let himself in and out because the barking paused and I heard a bell jingle on the other side of the door as the dog pulled the door open and then shoved past it to greet me.  
  
Rex leapt forward, resting his paws as high up my chest as he could reach and standing awkwardly on his one back leg. The move lifted his cart completely off the ground so almost all his weight rested on me and he knocked me back against the railing. As the big dog strained to lick my chin— and as I tried to avoid such licking— a barrage of thuds echoed through the house and Jack stumbled into view at the end of the hallway.  
  
His hair was sopping wet and he’d clearly just showered. Being so wet gave his hair even more shine than usual but turned it almost black. He had an expensive looking red towel draped over his shoulders under that hair so it didn’t soak the decently nice white shirt he wore with his incredibly tight dark jeans. I was starting to think that he only ever wore tight pants, but I didn’t mind that so much now that I’d decided to date him. He wore dark green plaid socks which turned out to be a bad choice given the tile floors. He smiled at me briefly, standing with one foot held slightly above the carpet. “Hi. Sorry, I guess I overestimated how long it would take you to get here.”  
  
I only glimpsed that peaceful grin for a second before he started for the door and nearly fell when his sock slipped on the tiles. Wincing, he stuck to the carpet and limped onward while I managed to force Rex off of me. The dog whined and looked from me to Jack before clattering off down the stairs into the garden. Jack was favoring his right ankle.  
  
“Hi. Are you okay?” By this point I expected injuries whenever I saw him. Somehow his general misfortune seemed appealing. I guess, in a way, it made sense that I would find someone so constantly in need of help so attractive, but I still felt kind of messed up for that.  
  
Jack leaned against the door to take his weight off that ankle, but he grinned. “I just twisted it a little, I’ll be fine.” He seemed to realize something and apologized suddenly, “Sorry, it just occurred to me: I don’t know if you like dogs or not, I should have penned him up or something.”  
  
He had a twisted ankle now in addition to all his other injuries and whatever he’d been to the hospital about, and he still managed to be this happy. I guess that good mood was contagious, because I smiled. “It’s fine. I don’t mind dogs, I just haven’t spent much time around them.”  
  
He relaxed, still smiling. I got the sense that he’d either taken his needed dose of painkiller or he was enjoying the pain because he seemed both particularly coherent and cheerful. Surprising, considering he was more or less starving. “Sorry, I tend to forget that some people don’t like dogs, so I tend not to consider it. My family had twenty-seven dogs; no one came over if they didn’t like dogs and I was never in a position to invite someone over myself.”  
  
I raised an eyebrow. “Twenty-seven? Over the course of your life, you mean, right?”  
  
He had been looking around for something, but now he frowned quizzically at me. “No, at the same time, at least as of a few months ago. We’ve probably had several hundred since I was born; my dad and grandparents used to breed deerhounds, wolfhounds, and pharaoh hounds and my mom fostered rescued dogs. I don’t think we ever had less than ten dogs at the same time, and then there were the horses, the fish, the sheep, the two cows, the alpacas, the birds, and the five cats. Although, to be fair, one of those was mostly a feral cat that lived in our field and let me pet him.”  
  
I stared at him. “Wow. You didn’t say you lived in a farm.” From what I knew of him I already figured his family had to be wealthy and I was suspicious that that was where at least half of his own wealth came from, considering he was a prostitute. I also suspected that, given that wealth and the way he seemed so open to danger, he could be a prostitute by choice. But up until now I’d mostly pictured a fairly small, somewhat run-down castle out on some island in the middle of nowhere in Scotland. Now I pictured something more like an estate, with sprawling grounds and pastures for all the animals. Exactly how much money did Jack’s family have? For that matter, how much did Jack have?  
  
Wealth itself had never mattered much to me in relationships beyond the fact that I preferred not to have to pay for everything, but it certainly did give people different perspectives on life and I started to wonder if Jack might just be too rich and too young for me to really relate to.  
  
Jack apparently found what he was looking for and leaned against the wall to put on one newly-retrieved discarded boot while he looked around for the other and failed to find it. I didn’t see it either.  
  
“It’s a big castle. And my mom, my sister, and I live with my aunts and cousins. The castle’s been in our family for hundreds of years, so mom likes to be practical and make use of the space as much as possible. We used to live with my uncle as well.” His chattiness surprised me. He went from avoiding telling me almost anything about his life to going on and on about it. I wasn’t complaining; I was still curious about him, obviously, but it seemed...unexpected. Why was he being so open all of a sudden? What exactly had changed in the past week?  
  
I hazarded the direct approach. “Why are you being so open with me all of a sudden?”  
  
He looked up and stepped away from the wall, still favoring his unshod foot. He seemed confused. “I thought that was what people did on dates. That’s what this is, right? Don’t they? Tell each other about themselves?”  
  
I frowned at him and he stared at me, forgetting his shoe. “Wait a second, you’ve never been on a date before?”  
  
Jack chuckled. “Ven wasn’t really a `dating’ kind of guy.” He went in search of his other shoe and I followed him as Rex clattered back up the stairs and into the house. He found it chewed under the table in the kitchen. Jack sighed and eyed the dog. Rex stood in the hallway and wagged his tail.  
  
“Ben?” I ignored the dog. I had a sneaking suspicion that this had something to do with another of his traumatizing experiences, and as I wanted to think that talking about his father had helped him, I hoped that talking about this ex of his would help him as well. Still, what he’d said implied that he only had one ex. With what I knew of Jack, I didn’t peg him as the type of guy to have only had one relationship in his life, even as young as he was. Unless maybe it was a really serious relationship, and even then. It seemed odd. I couldn’t help but wonder, both about what had happened with Ben and about, once again, whether or not Jack was too young for me.  
  
“Ven.” Jack corrected. “Venjamin Elijah Fisher.” He sat to put on his shoe and I saw that hollow look in his eyes again for a moment. He laughed wryly, a sound as empty as his expression. “Yeah, the V’s annoying. It sounds just like Benjamin. He always used to flip out when people called him Benjamin. I guess he was always kind of a dick.”  
  
I watched him quietly. “Bad break-up?” Why had I said that? Well this was a great start to the date, let’s talk about our exes. I really had to stop expecting things with Jack to ever be normal.  
  
Jack sat very still for a while. Rex came over and he petted the dog absently. I guess it made sense that he had grown up around so many animals, he certainly seemed good with them. Rex had taken to him as much as he had with his previous owner. It was as if Jack had known the dog for years.  
  
“Kind of.” I hadn’t expected Jack to answer but he did. But he didn’t explain, even though I’d gotten my hopes up enough to expect it.  
  
After another moment of quiet, he stood and looked around awkwardly. “...well, shall we?”  
  
“Right.” I tried to gloss over what had just happened. “So, restaurant or grocery store?”  
  
* * *  
  
That jumped my thoughts from Ven back to the dream I’d had a few hours ago. I shuddered. I’d dreamt my last day with Ven twelve times before it had happened. Admittedly, the restaurant dream had only happened today, but it was recent and it had been vivid. “Grocery store.”  
  
Arcade looked puzzled. He was cute puzzled. He was cute all the time, but particularly when he was puzzled. I found that look cheered me up a little.  
  
“You have some bad experience with restaurants or something?”  
  
I managed a genuine laugh at that statement. “No, just...had a nightmare about a restaurant. Right before you called actually.” I winced a little. Why did I keep making a fool of myself around him? “Sorry. I know that’s a stupid reason. It was just...really vivid, and it bothered me. A lot. I’d rather not go to a restaurant right afterwards. Sorry, I guess I’m just paranoid like that.”  
  
He hesitated. “Okay. Supermarket it is, then.” For an awkward moment neither of us moved and then we nearly collided when we stepped forward at the same time, but we eventually made it outside. I locked the door, hoping Rex would be fine for a little while, not that locking the door was remotely effective for keeping anyone out of my house, but it felt like the most I could really do. Down the stairs in silence, I realized absently that every house along the street had decorated for Halloween. I hadn’t thought it was that big a deal before.  
  
At the road, I realized that somehow I’d absurdly expected that battered white Ford waiting for us. Instead, I nearly laughed at the only car that I hadn’t seen before, and thus the one I deduced was Arcade’s. It was a sage green VW Beetle. There was no way that this was not a used car: for one thing, it looked fairly battered and dented, but it also had a row of at least twelve flower bumper stickers on the back of the car. Lily would have loved it.  
  
I didn’t comment on the car, although I grinned at him and he sort of shrugged. I figured the purchase had been more based on avoiding salesmen and less on making a statement one way or another. In fact, neither of us said anything until we were halfway to the store. It was less an awkward silence and more that I was lost in my contemplation of my dreams and he seemed lost in his thoughts as well. Part of me felt a little curious as to what he was thinking. He might be reconsidering a relationship with me again, because I was an idiot around people and never said or did the right things, it seemed. More likely he was just deciding which store to go to and how to get there.  
  
* * *  
  
Avoiding restaurants because of a dream he had. Okay, maybe Jack was too naive and immature and just plain messed up and this had all been an awful, awful idea in the first place.  
  
“Out of curiosity what happened in that dream you had? I mean, I’m more un—er—...accepting of avoiding a restaurant because you had a nightmare about a fire there or something than if you dreamt something absurd, like getting attacked by mutated chameleons.”  
  
“I dreamt that the restaurant exploded. Like, someone bombed it or something. It looked like a nice place, too, some kind of seafood place, I think. Probably has some kind of horrifying psychological meaning to dream of restaurants blowing up like that.”  
  
Well at least it was a fairly reasonable dream. “I’d think it’s less likely to be some product of a traumatized mind and more likely that your brain’s just being influenced by current events in this city, and with your luck I wouldn’t have been surprised if that would have ended up happening had we gone to a restaurant. I had actually been thinking of a seafood restaurant if you’d picked that idea.”  
  
He frowned at me, taking his eyes off the windows for the first time while in a car. “What do you mean `influenced by current events’?”  
  
Now it was my turn to be puzzled before my look turned more towards grim amusement. “You don’t pay attention to the news, do you?”  
  
He shook his head, glancing out the windows again, but still looking at me more than outside. “No. Never did anything but depress me. Why? Have there been a lot of bombings or something?”  
  
I nodded, somewhat disappointed that he hadn’t heard, but I guess I understood his reasoning. If he forgot to eat and sleep, there was always the possibility that he was clinically depressed, in which case avoiding such bad news was probably for the better. “I guess that makes sense. I was half afraid you’d just forgotten to do that along with eating and sleeping.”  
“And drinking water. And getting dressed.” I could tell he was trying to lighten the mood by his smile and I did laugh, mainly because that grin could make anything seem perfect.  
  
I laughed and then I sighed as I parked the car. I looked as him and shook my head, still grinning. “What am I ever going to do with you?”  
  
He quirked one eyebrow and that smile became a mischievous smirk. “You asking for suggestions?”  
  
The drastic change of subject left me dumbfounded. If we weren’t currently in public view in the middle of a city...  
  
He made no move to leave the car until I did, but Jack at least seemed to recognize that he hadn’t been about to get a response in the vein he’d been implying. I strongly suspected that he’d been messing with me with that line, probably with some intention to bring it up again once we got back to his house. One previous relationship and fifteen years my junior and he moved faster in relationships than I usually did, at least when alcohol wasn’t involved. Then again, he was a prostitute; I should have expected that.  
  
It occurred to me that this was the first time Jack hadn’t fled a car as soon as it was parked. Either the Beetle was somehow less terrifying than the Focus or, even less believably, the i8 (although, knowing Garrett, I could understand wanting to flee that car for other reasons) or talking about his father had started to get him over that trauma. If talking was all he needed to become less messed up, I could do this, I told myself. I could get Jack to talk about these things and hopefully that would not only get him emotionally stable, but also assuage my fears about his background. Perfect. As long as I really could get him to open up. It had only been a few days. I could do this.  
  
I followed him into the store and, after wandering aimlessly for a few moments, I realized he had no idea what he was actually looking for. Although I had some possibilities in mind, I wanted his input. I hadn’t exactly done the whole “grocery-store-to-home-meal” date before and hadn’t, for that matter, even heard it done, at least not this early in a relationship. This was technically a first date, right?  
  
“Have you actually cooked anything before?” He seemed young. Maybe he hadn’t. I didn’t want to believe that, but he apparently came from a rich family, so it was possible.  
  
Jack grinned awkwardly and shrugged. “More or less.” My raised eyebrow apparently inspired some elaboration, for a change. “I can bake. I’m really good at baking. Cooking everything else, not so much. I’ve never really tried. I mean, when I was with my mother and family, they cooked and god help anybody who dared enter the kitchen while they were working. Sometimes we hired cooks too, but my family mostly liked cooking, so that was only for really special occasions. When I was at school, there was either a cafeteria or I lived off take-out. That said, I’m good with chemistry, and isn’t cooking sort of the same? It’s a list of instructions and ingredients, right?”  
  
He’d caught me a little off-guard with that deluge of information. “Um, yeah, basically, I suppose. You like chemistry?” I hadn’t realized it, but I had no idea how educated he was, and now I wondered.  
  
Jack shrugged. “I’m good at it. Usually. I like art and writing and dead languages, mythology, and history. I was usually good at chemistry until we got into biopolymers, but I’ve probably forgotten a lot of that. I need a reference to keep all the different reactions straight after a certain point.”  
  
“Have you gone to college?”  
  
He looked at me as if he was surprised that he hadn’t mentioned it but didn’t think it much mattered. “I went to Cambridge for two years.”  
  
“Cambridge?” The guy was a prostitute who had studied at Cambridge. If I had ever thought that Jack was remotely normal, that would have changed my opinion. That also explained his intelligence. The guy hid that intellect remarkably well, or else he was just very learned and very clueless. “What did you study?”  
  
“Veterinary medicine. But I basically took any class that sounded interesting as well, and that was most of them. Except calculus. I despise calculus.” He paused to consider a display of berries.  
  
“Huh. I guess that makes sense with how well you handle animals.”  
  
He raised an eyebrow at me, pausing his examination of a package of raspberries. “You seem surprised?”  
  
I shrugged. “Sorry, you don’t seem like a vet.” I guess this was what I got for judging a book by its cover.  
  
He laughed. “What do I seem like to you?”  
  
Prostitute. “Um, I’m not sure...artist?” His grin gave me a sneaking suspicion that he at least guessed the nature of the impression he gave.  
  
“Artist is more accurate than vet anyway. I prefer art and I wasn’t exactly a great student.”  
  
“You got into Cambridge.”  
  
“And subsequently flunked out. Granted, there were extenuating circumstances, but I never really excelled at academics. I like to learn, that didn’t mean I tested well or put in much effort. I barely squeaked into Cambridge in the first place. I want to bake something.”  
  
“What exactly are you thinking of baking? And even so. That’s a really tough school to get into. Why did you study as a vet if you wanted to paint?”  
  
“Probably a cake. I’m good with desserts. I have no idea what to get for dinner.” He examined another container of raspberries and continued. “I studied as a vet because my family wouldn’t tolerate me `wasting my life’ as an artist. Veterinarian was still a step down, but I’m better with animals than people. Besides, the idea of working at a zoo seemed fun, as long as I could avoid the birds.”  
  
“Okay, cake and something else. Probably some kind of meat and vegetables, then. You have any preferences?” I was getting hungry and felt like sorting out the meal while we talked. Besides, I was fairly tired. It had been a long day at work. “Why exactly did you want to avoid the birds?”  
  
“Anything but ham. And I mean anything. I make a point of sampling exotic game when I travel, so I’ve had more or less everything edible. As far as veggies, maybe potatoes or turnips? Or pretty much anything; I’m not a picky eater.” He put the raspberries in the cart and followed it with a small assortment of fruits, some of which I couldn’t identify. “And birds hate me. I’ve only ever met two birds that don’t hate me and I raised those two from the egg. I’ve still got scars from the amount of times they’ve pecked and scratched me.”  
  
“You hate ham?” He nodded. “Chicken it is then. I’ve never met anyone who hated ham. You never cease to surprise.”  
That mischievous smirk was back. “Is that a bad thing?”  
  
And it was as contagious as his good mood. “Not remotely.”  
  
Seemingly noticing that we were both still in public, Jack changed the subject and picked up a large white vegetable. “Turnips?”  
  
“Sure.” I felt compelled to suggest something that wasn’t another root vegetable. “Corn?”  
  
“Sure.” He started heading for the other ingredients for a cake and I followed. “You raised birds as well as dogs? What kind of birds?” I’d expected an answer somewhere between parakeets and canaries. I should have known it would never be something so normal.  
  
“My family bred and raised practically everything we kept. We had dogs, Clydesdales, thoroughbreds, fish, cheviot sheep, highland cattle, alpaca, scottish folds, a maine coon, manx, merlins, and eagles as breeding animals.”  
  
I stared at him. “You bred eagles?”  
  
“Not bald eagles, just goldens. The two birds that don’t hate me are Altair and Guinevere, an eagle and a merlin respectively. They sort of listen and don’t actively try to peck or claw me. Their parents, on the other hand, attack the bars of their pens when I get anywhere nearby. I expect it from Fleming, Altair’s father, because that old eagle hates everybody, but the others are normally docile, especially Merlin. Merlin loves everybody but me. And yes, my family keeps a merlin named Merlin.” In an obvious attempt to explain all that, he added, “Falconry is a bit of a hobby in my family.”  
  
“Apparently.” I chuckled a bit at the sheer absurdity of the menagerie. “Did you name the merlin Merlin?”  
  
He grinned and shook his head. “Dad thought the name was funny. The bird’s supposedly really affectionate, it just hates me. I’ve seen it almost snuggle people’s hands before.” He voiced my expression with another laugh, “Yeah, my family’s pets are pretty crazy. My sister keeps talking about getting a fox, but I doubt mom will ever let her.”  
  
“You have a sister?”  
  
He frowned. “Yeah. I thought I mentioned her before.”  
  
* * *  
  
He looked oddly surprised by that. As if he’d thought I didn’t for some reason. “Sorry, you just act like an only child. You never mentioned her in all those stories and it sounded like your mom was...well...more-or-less your only close family.”  
I shrugged. “There’s an age difference. A big one. Ten years or so. She turned ten a few months ago.” I fell silent for a few minutes to calculate how much chocolate I would need for the recipe. My only cake pan was a different size than the one my mother had used when she made this and subsequently taught me how to make it. That was one of the few cooking lessons I’d ever gotten. “You have any siblings?”  
  
He shook his head. He looked a little sad and I wondered why. I knew a ton of innocuous phrases dredge up trauma with me, but Arcade didn’t strike me as the kind of person who had such a dark past. He seemed very open and innocent for some reason, or maybe that was just how I wanted to see him at the time.  
  
I searched for a change of subject. I was bad at finding one.  
  
“No, I’m an only child. I was pretty much raised by my mother; my father died when I was young and I never got over it.” He sounded like he was going to stop there, but then he added quickly, “Younger than you. Younger than you were when your father died, I mean. Like, too young to remember him.” He got very quiet and I understood the feeling completely. Maybe that was worse if one couldn’t remember than if one kept remembering, painfully and vividly, whether I wanted to or not.  
There wasn’t any way I could know or judge. I grasped at the first change of subject I could find. “Um...so, I mentioned my only previous boyfriend, and I figure you’ve probably dated at least someone...”  
  
* * *  
He was grasping at any change of subject he could think of. Oddly enough, discussing my past relationships was a much happier topic than my parents. We were at the check-out line at this point so I decided to stay silent, but I planned to continue the conversation later. Jack gravitated to the self-check-out and I happily followed. I didn’t need the addition of any annoying cashiers to make the current silence between me and Jack any more awkward. Besides, I had a suspicion that cashiers might annoyingly think Jack and I were father and son, which would be massively awkward as well as irritating and emotionally painful given both of our situations with our fathers.  
  
Telling Jack about my own fairly bland relationships could prompt him to tell me more about whatever had happened with this `Venjamin’ guy. On one hand I was curious, on the other getting him to open up about it might help him with whatever had happened then. He had looked traumatized by it, and knowing Jack, he probably was.  
  
I hadn’t considered who would pay, but Jack took out his wallet before I could go for mine. “You bought the Chinese, I’ll buy this. You’ve done a lot for me, actually, so in case I haven’t said it before, thanks. A lot.” He sounded like he was going to add something but thought better of it.  
  
“Any time. It’s not like you haven’t been hospitable as well.” He used a debit card, I noticed. It had a custom picture of horses on it. I had expected cash or credit cards and it seemed to say something significant about him that he used debit. I couldn’t think of a single person who regularly used debit. Maybe that was his alternative to carrying huge amounts of cash.  
  
We got the groceries into the car which somehow managed to hold much more than I’d expected and drove back to his house. He didn’t find any better conversation topics and I didn’t find a good way to answer the last thing he’d asked me until we had everything laid out on the extensive countertops of his kitchen. Rex watched hopefully.  
  
“You were right, I’ve had a lot of boyfriends. I haven’t had a lot of bad break-ups or anything overly eventful like that.”  
  
Jack, who had been looking at me, stared down at the bowl in which he was combining the first mix of cake ingredients. He apparently knew the recipe from memory, because he hadn’t gotten anything out to work from. “Sorry. You don’t need to talk about that if you don’t want to, I was just...”  
  
“You were just trying to change the subject.” I grinned and he looked up in time to see it. “No offense, but I’ve done the same thing a lot around you. And I can talk about it, if you want to know. Like I said, nothing really noteworthy happened. I’m boring.”  
  
“Boring can be good. You’re not bad boring. Believe me, with my life, I really appreciate boring.” He went back to the cake for a moment and then added, “You can talk about that, if you want. I’m curious, but you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”  
  
* * *  
  
I said that mostly because I wanted him to talk about something so my mind wouldn’t wander back to my mother because I was making the cake she had always made at any major event. It felt somehow like making it here, while I was basically on a date with a man, in my own house, using bowls and utensils I had bought with money I’d earned writing erotica, I was liberating the cake from the memories and association with my family and all their harsh condemnations of my life. Really, it was just a cake, but it felt good to make. It felt like I was finally free.  
  
But it still reminded me of her. I needed some distraction, and I was relieved when he awkwardly started talking. He was also cooking while he spoke, getting out the chicken and peeling and slicing the neeps.  
  
“Well...I’ve dated a lot. Had a lot of...one night stands, as well. I prefer more serious relationships, but life’s busy and I go to bars sometimes, so things tend to happen... Things usually just don’t work out and we both realize it and things end that way.”  
  
He paused for a while and, in the interest of keeping my thoughts away from my mother, I commented. “I can’t drink. Not that I would if I could, it’s just never been an issue. That kinda put a damper on my social life. I’ve never really hooked up per say and didn’t end up getting involved before Ven. I was with him for almost two years and I thought it was serious. I’m also guessing you’ve never been with anyone as young as me.” I looked at him and he seemed surprised, although by what, I wasn’t sure.  
  
“What makes you think I haven’t been with anyone as young as you? I presume you mean since I was a lot younger, and in that case, you’re right, I’m just curious.”  
  
“For one thing, I heard Garrett, and for another I got the distinct impression that Daisy wasn’t keen on our relationship. As she clearly knew your preferences and commented to me about mine earlier— and apparently had no problem with either— I figured it was my age that bothered her.”  
  
He stared. “You’re surprisingly perceptive.”  
  
“Surprisingly?”  
  
“No offense, but you seem a little...oblivious sometimes.”  
  
I snorted. “I am oblivious sometimes. I just want to pay attention when things involve you.”  
  
He gave me an odd look I hadn’t expected. “Are you complimenting me or saying that I’m suspicious?”  
  
I frowned at him. “You’re the least suspicious person I’ve ever met; I meant that as a compliment. You seem really open about everything, I mean, heck, you’re telling me about your exes and it’s basically our first date, right?”  
  
“Good point. No reason to think I’m suspicious or anything. Heh...”  
  
I raised an eyebrow. “...should I be suspicious of you?”  
  
“No, um, not at all. I’m just babbling, don’t mind me. I’m boring, right? Now what were we saying about my exes?”  
I gave him a long and curious stare and let it go. Was he just really awkward? There was no way he actually had something to hide. I mean, he was a good-samaritan doctor who’d already saved my life multiple times, what could he possibly be hiding?  
  
We cooked for a few more minutes in silence until everything was in the oven. It was technically two ovens and thus could bake two different things at the same temperature even if it was just one big appliance. The cake smelled amazing and soon the chicken did as well. My house smelled like heaven. Not having eaten in over a day, my stomach started commenting on that and I found myself watching the oven a bit impatiently. Rex, smelling the chicken, did the same. He looked like he might be drooling a little, actually.  
  
* * *  
  
Jack and the dog were staring at the oven and something was growling. I looked back and forth between them. “Is that your stomach or the dog?”  
  
“Probably my stomach.”  
  
“Yeah. Exactly why you should probably eat regularly.” I realized what that might mean and added, “You have been feeding Rex, right?”  
  
He nodded towards a door beside the hallway. The handle had a large ornament of fabric and rope with a bell on the end. It had been crafted to resemble a dog bone, so I figured it was less a decoration and more a repurposed dog toy. It didn’t really answer my question, so he elaborated, “I have one on the front door as well. At first, I planned to train the dog to ring the bell to remind me to feed him and let him out, but he went a step further. He uses the rope to pull the handle of the doors and feed himself. He also lets himself out. I’m not sure how he gets water, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had ways of doing that as well. He’s much smarter than I expected. Smarter than most of my family’s dogs too; sighthounds aren’t known for brains. Turing is the only smarter dog I’ve owned— appropriately named, right?— and even that’s debatable.”  
  
“Turing? Named after Alan Turing, the genius scientist?”  
  
Jack nodded. “Yup. Turing was my dog and one of the rescues. He was smart and charming enough that we ended up keeping him. He was also the smartest dog I’ve ever seen, although he had a few stupid moments, like all dogs do.” He fell silent and I considered the reasons he might have chosen to name a dog after a massively influential— and gay— genius scientist. “...have you ever had any pets?”  
  
I shook my head. My situation growing up hadn’t really been safe for a child; no reason to bring any animal lives into it. He gave me a strange look.  
  
“We’re dramatically different people, aren’t we?” I was right from the start, but for the wrong reasons. Even if we tried, this would never work. We were just too different. Even if he was educated, we came from completely different backgrounds. We had nothing but education in common and that just would never be enough. That’s what I thought he was thinking as well.  
  
* * *  
  
“Yeah. We are.” I had grown up with a menagerie of animals, a huge family of successful women, and a ton of wealth, and from what I knew and supposed about him, he had grown up in some kind of bad situation with next to no family, a friend who seemed more like a foster mother to him, no pets, and, I suspected, little to no money. In our pasts, we had virtually no common ground except college, which had probably gone very differently for us. He struck me as a genius and I had squeaked by as a student and then flunked out. I was massively immoral and he was practically a saint. He was a doctor and I wasted my life writing porn and painting morbid art. He seemed completely in control of a miserable but normal life and I failed miserably at my weak attempts to manage a life that handed me everything on a silver platter. We had nothing in common at all. That was why I needed him.  
  
* * *  
  
My gaze had drifted to the oven while he replied, but his tone wasn’t what I expected at all. He sounded happy. Looking back at his face, I found him grinning at me. “So our differences are good, in your opinion?”  
“Amor vincit omnia.” [Love conquers all]  
  
There was another difference. I liked to think I was normally pretty smooth, but he made me feel like an awkward teenager again and said stuff like that. In latin. Damn.  
  
Jack crossed the room in one graceful stride and he had me locked in a kiss before I could move to do the same. He must have helped himself to the berries, mangos, bananas, and papaya he’d been preparing, because his soft lips tasted distinctly fruity.  
  
* * *  
  
I kissed him as soon as I saw the look he got when I replied with another of the few Latin quotes I knew. I wondered if he noticed my flavored chap-stick. Or the fact that I was quickly getting hard. I had no business living on my own, I don’t think I’d even really been ready for college, hell, I couldn’t manage to put down a paint brush enough to eat and sleep like a basic human being, and as much as that incompetence made me hate myself it also really turned me on how much I needed someone else because of that. Someone like Arcade. Someone who was moral and had enough compassion and tolerance to deal with me. Although being sexy as all hell sure helped. And being a doctor. And he was currently wearing that sexy white lab coat.  
  
I slid the hand of my broken arm up his bicep and over to the collar of his shirt, which I slowly began to unbutton. My other hand slid down the muscles of his abdomen towards his belt. His arms wrapped my chest in a hug before one hand slid downward along my spine. I pressed my tongue against his lips and only prodded once before he let it in. Our tongues explored each other’s mouths while our hands sought much different terrain. I unbuttoned his shirt and ran my fingers over his chiseled chest while his right hand traced the muscles of my back through my own shirt. His other hand groped my ass and my good hand slid under his belt to delve into his pants. At some point Rex went ballistic and neither of us even looked at him.  
  
* * *  
  
As before, the dog shut up once it saw me and that was approximately the moment that I saw his owner. Well that explained why Jack hadn’t been painting and why the house actually smelled of food, for a change.  
  
I had returned much earlier than I had planned for three reasons, one of which happened to be the fact that I knew Jack had not been eating and needed to do so. Apparently, I should not have been concerned; the doctor would ensure that he did not kill himself out of negligence. I would prefer that Jack did not die while he could still be useful to the Legion, but it was more than that. I found myself attached to the oddly clueless man. My feelings were unimportant and I had rarely paid attention to such things before anyway, but I found myself atypically inclined to keep this ever-surprising, artistic asset from my distant past alive and around. If it came to it, I would rather enslave him and keep him that way than kill him, but I still trusted that I could easily put him down if Caesar ordered me to do so. But I had been given no such orders yet, so I wanted him alive, and recent knowledge could make that difficult, which was another reason that I had come here.  
  
The orientation of the hallway and the kitchen left me in full view of the couple before I had been able to see them, thus, when neither Jack nor the doctor reacted to my sudden arrival or the dog’s silence, I trusted that they would not see me, although I still resolved to be quick. I walked silently past them and checked the kitchen windows. All locked, all secure. No evidence of a break in. Excellent. Passing within inches of Jack and the doctor, I proceeded to the next room, paying little attention to the lovers and checking the rest of the house. I would return in a few hours and hopefully find Jack in a better position to speak to me.  
  
* * *  
  
The oven timer went off before we got beyond fondling and making out. Both of us were too hungry to ignore the food by that point. I set the cake on a metal cooling rack and Arcade dished up the chicken and veg while Rex got underfoot sniffing the air. Being used to very big dogs, I habitually barricaded the cake behind a series of cutting boards and spatulas.  
  
Arcade was staring at me when I turned towards him to get some silverware. “The cake needed shelter?”  
  
I laughed. “I call it the dog wall. I’m used to counter-height canines.”  
  
He frowned at me again while we moved the dinner to the kitchen table I had yet to eat at. “Counter-height? Exactly how big were your dogs?”  
  
I tried to estimate the measurements in the imperial system and failed, so I summarized and showed each height with my hand. “Wolfhounds tend to be around a meter at the shoulder, deerhounds are more like eighty centimeters, and pharaohs are around fifty. Turing, some kind of terrier mix, is about twenty centimeters at the shoulder.” I was too used to veterinary students and my family; I should have realized that he might not know the sheer size of the dogs my family bred. I felt bad for assuming that.  
  
“Jeez, you had twenty-seven dogs that huge?”  
  
“Well, we only had thirteen or fourteen inside at once, most times. They were breeding dogs, except for Turing, so we had to keep the males and females separate and we had a huge yard, so we’d let one pack run free a while and then switch them out.”  
  
We both started eating at that point and the conversation paused. We also both burned our mouths by trying to eat before the chicken had really cooled down. He was an amazing cook, better than my mother and that was really saying something— I’d seen the woman turn wild pit viper and grubs into something I actually wanted to eat. Or maybe the chicken just seemed so amazing because I hadn’t eaten in nearly two days.  
  
While we ate, I realized something. While we’d been making out, something had brushed my shoulder. I’d thought it was Arcade at the time, but one of his hands had been in my hair and the other had been squeezing my ass, so it couldn’t have been him and there was nothing else that might have touched me.  
  
* * *  
  
The chicken had turned out pretty good and I was hungry enough that it took me a moment to notice Jack frowning. He looked confused. “Something wrong?”  
  
He swallowed and tilted his head at me. “Did you brush my shoulder while...while this was cooking? Towards the end?”  
  
I mirrored that expression. “Towards the end? No. My hands were kind of occupied, by that point. ...Did you feel something brush your shoulder?” That was...disturbing. The irrational part of me was thinking “ghost-of-the-house’s-previous-owner” and the rational part was thinking “hallucination.” Either way, that was bad.  
  
He shook his head dismissively. “Probably just my hair.” He tried to sound calm, but I caught that tone that suggested he thought there was another explanation. Hopefully he was thinking hallucinations. I wasn’t sure whether or not I really believed in ghosts, but it was almost Halloween and with the way this house looked, I wouldn’t have been surprised.  
  
Jack must have been trying to eat more slowly so as to avoid being left unoccupied if he finished the meal first. I finished the meal slightly before him and sought a conversation topic as the silence dragged on. For some reason, nothing came to mind but his previous questions about my exes. Why couldn’t I think of a decent thing to talk about on our first real date? Kind of. I suppose saving him from starvation still wasn’t exactly a date.  
  
Jack finished his meal and started getting us both servings of cake and tea before I found anything better to discuss. Luckily, he seemed equally at a loss.  
  
“Well, any exes you want to talk about? What’s the most serious you’ve gotten in a relationship?”  
  
He was waiting for the kettle to boil and even though the question came out of the blue, I didn’t mind answering. Rex opened the pantry and helped himself to a few gulps of kibble while I replied. “Well, I don’t have many ex-boyfriends who are particularly noteworthy. I dated Garrett—briefly—, and there was one researcher at the hospital, and I was with a rookie cop, but that didn’t last long...” The cop in particular. Daisy had gone ballistic, almost as much as she had when she’d found out I was involved with Jack. And apparently the police were kind of homophobic, so that hadn’t lasted long on either side. The researcher and I had just been too different and parted ways. As for Garret, commitment simply wasn’t in his vocabulary. Besides, he got a bit too disturbing in bed. We were better off as friends. Not that I hadn’t gotten drunk and lonely and depressed at times and dropped by his place with other motives. Strictly casual, of course. There was no way I was getting back with Garrett, I actually wanted a long-term commitment, ideally, and he just wanted someone to screw around with. Literrally. Come to think of it, Garrett had been the last person I’d slept with before Jack.  
  
“I guess the last long term thing I had was with a man called Tea. Well, that was a nickname, really.” I couldn’t actually recall his surname. He might never have told me. He’d been strange that way. I could feel like I knew everything about him and then I’d realize how little he’d actually told me. The man had kept several iguanas I hadn’t known existed for two of the three years we’d been living together. That had been part of why we’d broken up, but it had really been more because we just weren’t looking for the same things in life. Not the iguanas; the accidental secrets. Jack, at least, seemed like he’d open up to me in time. Tea had just never felt like I needed to be told anything, even fairly important things like whether or not I wanted my apartment to play host to half a dozen strange reptiles that ultimately got out and savaged various books and documents.  
  
Jack frowned, “Short for Teagan, right?”  
  
I tilted my head at him. “Yeah. It’s not exactly a well-known name, how’d you know?”  
  
“My uncle’s name is Teagan and he goes by Tea.”  
  
I lapsed into an awkward silence. There was no way that was the same person.  
  
* * *  
  
There was no way he’d dated my quirky uncle. I hadn’t seen Uncle Tea in years and last I heard he’d been flying bush planes in the Australian outback. There was no possible way that this could be the same Teagan out in California. There had to be more than one gay guy named Teagan who went by Tea, right?  
  
The kettle boiled, breaking my contemplation, and I finished bringing the drinks and cake back to the table. I was more than a little worried about how the recipe would turn out. For one thing, my memory for instructions wasn’t always reliable, so I could easily have made it wrong and for another in past attempts, I had inexplicably managed to turn this cake into charcoal, semi-hardened batter, and— most strangely— a pan-sized bar of solid chocolate too hard to bite. I hoped that this rendition would prove much more successful.  
  
“How long did you date him, anyway?” I asked, trying to postpone the moment that would reveal the truth of my baking skills.  
  
“Four years. How long were you with Ven?” I hadn’t expected the question or the name. It tore my thoughts back to my ex.  
  
* * *  
  
Damn. I hadn’t meant to ask, but I’d been wondering. The words had slipped out before I could stop them and I regretted the question immediately. The hollow look in Jack’s beautiful eyes hit me like a kick in the gut. Dammit, just one conversation, was that too much to ask? Just one conversation where I didn’t make the poor guy relive one of his past traumas!  
Luckily, nature spared us the awkward moment.  
  
* * *  
  
With Jack occupied, I chose to wait in the upstairs bathroom, hidden in the corner beside the painting and unable to be seen by anyone on the other side. Neither Jack nor the doctor moved quietly; with my hearing I would know if they were headed towards me the moment they neared the stairs. I could dart through the painting silently, if that happened, but for now I lay in wait. The waiting paid off.  
  
After nearly an hour, the painting slid silently inward, towards me. I watched as a set of fingers curled around the edge, as a body followed that hand, and, finally, as a face emerged to cautiously survey the room. My left hand snagged the man’s wrist while my right wrapped his throat and slammed him against the wall. I recognized him at the same instant that his eyes widened in horrified recognition of me.  
  
The man was one of my lesser frumentari; his name was Septimus. My reputation in the Legion was formidable and many recruits and even some more senior men would greet such an aggressive action on my part with outright terror, but my own frumentari had been trained to be more calm. I expected some low level of fear, admittedly, but outright horror indicated deceit. Had Septimus only flinched, I would have been willing to dismiss his presence as innocuous, probably some miscommunication or curiosity. He would only look so terrified to see me if he had, as I suspected, been operating under the orders of someone else either to investigate, capture, or murder Jack or to tail me. The latter seemed more likely.  
  
Septimus began to stammer an explanation, but I cut him off, expecting lies. “Septimus, why are you following me?”  
  
He stammered again. “S-sir, I did no such thing, I was merely sent to— to speak to the man who lives here—” That slight hesitation before he gave the reason...  
  
It was a lie. Septimus was significantly taller than me- as were most men, but I used my own strength and leverage to force him onto the tips of his toes, still holding him to the wall by his throat and now pressing my fingers into the sides of his neck.  
  
“If you lie to me again I will gouge your eyes from their sockets and shove them up your ass. Under whose orders are you operating and are you after me or Jack?”  
  
His free arm shot to his machete but I was faster. I kneed him in the gut and flung the weapon aside. I had been about to speak again as he sank forward against my hand, but he choked out a response in snarled Latin. “The great Vulpes Inculta seduced by a filthy profligate man whore. Even if you kill me, others will come; we will make you watch him suffer. We know your weakness, you fucking—”  
  
I released his wrist intending to make good on my promise to gouge out his eyes, but at that moment a tremor rocked the house and the unlatched painting door smacked into me. Septimus stumbled and rolled towards the bedroom, putting enough distance between us for him to draw his pistol as the house filled with the deafening rattling of its contents. In the other room I heard jars of paint clinking together in their boxes. The tone reverberated through the partly soundproofed house, and from that I inferred that our combat would be rendered inaudible to the couple downstairs. Superb.  
  
In the small tiled room, the first gunshot resounded like the detonation of a bomb and sent a painful vibration through my bones. But I’d been ready for it, having not only fired much higher caliber firearms in small, uncarpeted rooms, but also felt and heard powerful explosions in similar circumstances. Septimus was unprepared. The amplified sound dazed him and left him clutching his skull while I was free to retaliate. In an instant, I had his discarded machete in hand and I flung it at him, closing the gap between us and drawing my much larger pistol while he ducked the projectile. It stuck in the wall behind him as the bullet of his first shot had marred the wall behind me.  
  
He pulled the trigger before he could aim as I shot for his throat. He slipped on the tile as our guns went off, causing my bullet to graze the side of his face and lodge in the ceiling. Like all head wounds, the line of torn flesh from his jaw to his brow poured blood into his eyes and splattered the floor. I planted a knee in his groin and used the leverage to slam him to the floor, cracking his skull. Septimus leveled his pistol at my chest and pulled the trigger. The firing mechanism clicked against an empty chamber. He was out of ammo.  
  
I planted a foot on his groin and straightened up to yank the machete out of the wall. Septimus rolled beneath me, shifting my leg and my balance. I could have easily used the fall to drive a cut to his throat or a stab to his heart, or a chop aimed at the center of his skull. But I was trying to conceal the fact that such a fight had ever occurred. Septimus had made no mention of Caesar in his tirade, so it was likely that only he and the one who had ordered him knew of his mission. Even if more people knew, they were not likely to openly tell Caesar or act against me publicly. I already planned to kill him, but it would go untraced. Septimus would simply vanish. His body would never be found and the profligate police would continue to focus on profligate crimes and the acts that the Legion orchestrated to cause fear. And I would enjoy taking the time to kill him somewhere that the action would never be discovered. He had been stupid or perhaps unlucky enough to confront me so close to the perfect place for such activities.  
  
But I could not end him in this room. Holding the machete carefully at my side, I fell in such a way as to drive my knee into his ribcage, cracking at least one rib and knocking the breath from his lungs. Septimus coughed, momentarily stunned. That gave me the chance I needed to grab his throat and press my thumb against his windpipe. With his breath already driven from his lungs and my weight on his chest, he blacked out in a matter of seconds. When I felt certain that he could not be faking, I stood and stowed his machete alongside my own: hidden in a leather sheath strapped to my upper thigh. I preferred to use my pistol.  
  
Ignoring the bullets now embedded in the walls I glanced around the room. The blood on the floor could easily go unseen, and when it dried it would easily be mistaken for more of the mess left from my earlier meeting with Jack. He had not cleaned and so I doubted he would even detect the subtle changes.  
  
The earthquake had stopped and with it, I could hear Jack and the doctor moving towards the stairs. I had little time to conceal the confrontation. Dragging Septimus into the concealed portion of the house proved challenging, but I managed it in time and closed the painting. With the immediate problem taken care of, I allowed myself to relax. My adrenaline ebbed and I sank to a crouch against the wall by my unconscious, traitorous subordinate. While my tension eased, I realized something rather critical.  
  
* * *  
  
The earthquake was relatively small and I had lived in California long enough to be accustomed to some degree of occasional shaking. It wasn’t completely insignificant; had it gone on longer or been slightly more violent, I would have at least gone to stand in a doorway, and as it was, I considered it. The silverware and dishes rattled in the cabinets, the tea in our mugs rippled visibly and the mugs vibrated but nothing fell or broke here. Upstairs, glass objects preformed a deafening concert. I’d seen some tourists experience their first earthquakes and so I expected fear or uncertainty in Jack’s eyes, but he grinned, his bad memories momentarily forgotten.  
  
“I’ve never been in an earthquake before...” He stood experimentally and walked shakily around the kitchen, visibly enjoying the challenge of balancing. “...cool...”  
  
“Yeah. It’s great fun until someone gets hurt. Which can be said about a lot of things.” I’d been counting the seconds. Around the seven second mark I got up and stood in the doorway to the hall. “It might—” I fell silent as the shaking stopped. I could have sworn I’d just heard a gunshot.  
  
* * *  
  
Arcade paled as the quake ended and my own excitement vanished with the tremors. “What is it?”  
  
“Did you hear anything just now?”  
  
“Over the dishes, mugs, and pretty much everything else in my house? No. What did you hear?”  
  
He hesitated. “...Nothing. Forget I mentioned it.” He looked frightened. Not just concerned, as he had during the quake, but actually frightened. A thought occurred to me, but I dismissed it. If Vulpes had snuck into my house, there was no way he would ever have made a sound unless he really wanted to be heard, and then he would have just walked in here with us.  
  
“It might have been something falling over upstairs. With my luck, something breakable. I’ll go check my studio, quick...—”  
  
“I’ll come with you.” He was already in the doorway whereas I was towards the back of the kitchen, so he stepped out of the way and waited for me.  
  
“It’ll just take me a second, you can stay and eat, if you want...” He looked really concerned. I’d just thought the sound had startled him, but this was a much more serious fear. The last time I’d seen that look had been in Africa right after our guide recognized a fresh lion paw print. “Why are you so worried? Isn’t the house fine if it survived the initial quake? Or is there something else?”  
  
* * *  
  
I guess I wasn’t as good at hiding my fear as I had thought. “Oh, I, um...just...heard some disturbing creaking. It might not be...safe. Things sometimes...collapse...after...a while after quakes...” Hopefully that would sound reasonable enough. I couldn’t actually tell him that I was pretty sure I’d heard a gunshot. For one thing, if I was wrong, then he’d probably wonder when I’d heard such a sound before and if I was right I’d rather not panic him and potentially involve the police. They might find out about my past if that happened. Besides, it was probably just my own traumatic memories making me interpret an unknown noise as a more familiar gunshot. Kind of depressing that such noises were so well-known to me.  
  
Jack looked puzzled. “Arcade, have you been in a building collapse?”  
  
“Me? No. Of course not. Why would you think that?” He considered me curiously. Right. Now the shoe was on the other foot, inevitably. Maybe we should both just shut up about our secrets and stop asking. Who was I kidding? We were far too curious to ever let that happen.  
  
We lapsed into silence. Jack spoke next at the same moment that he started for the stairs. “...I’m gonna check my studio. If you want, you can join me.”  
  
I had been able to see the stairs since the quake and no one had come down. Hopefully, I had only imagined the gunshot. If I hadn’t, and we were lucky, it had happened somewhere nearby but not in the house. It worried me more that I’d heard it than it would have if I had just seen a burglar. If someone was shooting in the house but not at either me or Jack, then who were they shooting at?  
  
Jack thumped up the stairs ahead of me. I had heard him move quietly sometimes, but he took the stairs at a run and between his heavy boots and his apparent disregard for the noise he made, his footsteps echoed through the eerily silent house. I followed him as softly as I could, every nerve of my body on edge. I had done this a hundred times before, but never in a lover’s house. Sometimes people broke into my apartment. Sometimes things seemed out of place. It was usually a false alarm and I’d never had to do more than threaten lately. I had sometimes needed to shoot people, but the last time had been in high school, when my mother had made me a bit easier to find. Now, living alone and more experienced at keeping the secret, I hadn’t faced a serious threat in a long time. Usually I was only a bad liar when talking to lovers. I didn’t want to lie to the people I cared about. Granted, I felt like I hardly ever told the truth to anyone else, which probably said something awful about my morality, but it bothered me more when I was actually lying to someone I wanted to be honest with.  
  
I had a high caliber handgun on me most of the time. I’d gotten to be somewhat of an expert at hiding it over the years, so I didn’t think Jack had actually noticed it yet, particularly considering that I had yet to take my pants completely off around him. I drew it surreptitiously while I followed him and switched off the safety. If we found trouble, or at least more trouble than usual up here, I wanted to be able to shoot on sight.  
  
Jack thundered into the studio with me right behind him. A few brushes had rolled off the tables and one blank canvas had fallen off an easel, but everything seemed unharmed and, more importantly, there was no sign of anyone but Jack. I stayed close behind him, keeping my guard up as he checked everything. He’d been painting a lot. I tried not to look too hard right now, but still gave each canvas a passing glance. There was a fox drinking from an icy creek, a skeletal cat looking at the reflection of a lion with a blood-soaked mane, and that painting of a man on horseback looking out on a city. A city that had taken on an eerie look. That painting alone was still unfinished. The buildings of the city were rendered in shades of red and orange with brilliantly pale skeletal frameworks bending as if melting. The unfinished background showed a faint white sketch of what looked like a mushroom cloud.  
  
I tried not to read into the kind of dark and terrifying personality such paintings might indicate. Jack was traumatized. It was as simple as that. He was an innocent, traumatized, dangerously charming young man, and that was perfectly okay. More than okay, by my biased judgement.  
  
Jack checked the studio, the bedroom, and a surprisingly large storage room behind the former. Nothing was broken and nothing had fallen that could have sounded anything like a gunshot. He didn’t notice the gun in my hand until he went to check the bathroom. Seeing it, he frowned.  
  
I’m not really sure what I expected from him, but as usual, his reaction managed to surprise me. Jack tilted his head and that frown of curiosity metamorphosed into a grin. “Do you always carry a gun? Why exactly did you feel the need for one right now?”  
  
I awkwardly set the gun on the bathroom counter, uncomfortable with anything he might think of me because of it. Bringing weapons into a relationship just tended to make things more difficult, or so I’d found in the past. Besides, it seemed like any danger there might have been was already gone.  
  
* * *  
  
Truthfully, the fact that he had concealed a gun on him alarmed me about as much as the fact that he had felt the need to draw it. What had him so scared and why did he need a gun in the first place? Did all Americans just carry guns everywhere at all times? If that was the case, then I was more surprised I hadn’t gotten shot yet. It shocked me that he’d managed to keep it hidden, too, considering how much I’d felt him up and that we’d nearly had sex. Was everyone I found myself attracted to inevitably deadly? …on the other hand, that did seem appropriate, given my own outlook on death.  
  
Part of me was disappointed that the man I had idealized as purely good and lacking any secrets turned out to be armed and probably, my intermittent instincts told me, more secretive than I had wanted. But idealization was always a stupid path to take and no one was ever purely good, or so I had come to believe. He was human. Everyone was human. I had been an idiot to think of him as perfect, but looking back, I suspected that my blindness to reality had been a defense mechanism. I hadn’t been able to deal with the truth earlier; after everything that had happened I had just needed to keep things simple. I guess things were simple with Vulpes. If he wanted sex, we had sex, if he wanted to kill me, he would kill me. He did what he wanted and I let him. It was like dating a wild cat. That was dangerous, but the sheer simplicity had been exactly what I needed at the time. I hadn’t been able to handle another real relationship then. In a way, having whatever it was that I had with Vulpes had been the perfect alliance to get me over everything that had happened and to prepare me for establishing more normal relationships again.  
  
Both through what had happened between me and Vulpes and through my week of avid art, I had managed to overcome the recent past. Now I was okay. I wasn’t amazing, I don’t really think I could ever be perfectly happy again, but at the moment I was probably as close as I could hope to get.  
  
Aside from the fact that my possible boyfriend had just been waving a gun around. A large gun. A very large gun. It was some kind of pistol. Maybe a Desert Eagle. I knew hardly anything about guns, but that was my best guess. That was also the only high-caliber pistol I knew of, so I was probably wrong.  
  
He’d stared at me awkwardly while I thought, but now Arcade voiced the best answer he could find. I could tell that it wasn’t entirely the truth. “Just...sometimes. I...live in a bad neighborhood. You’ve seen it, I mean, you know that... Um...I thought I heard...something up here...”  
  
Was I just being paranoid, or did most of that sound like lies?  
  
* * *  
  
“The sagging of the house?” Now he was clearly being sarcastic. I sighed.  
  
“Sorry. I can’t talk about it.” I could tell from Jack’s quirked eyebrow that he was curious, but he knew better than to ask. He seemed oddly calm; people usually freaked out when I said that kind of thing. Not that I did often. As much as I wanted to talk to people about it. And couldn’t. Honestly, Jack’s silent curiosity was the best reaction I’d ever gotten.  
  
He looked around the bathroom, not seeming to notice anything out of the ordinary. “So this thing you heard, you see any sign of it? Because everything looks fine to me...”  
  
I walked around the small room, trying to look like I was good at searching places. I hadn’t seen anything so far, but then again I’d never been the best at noticing things. It had usually been a sense of instinctive unease which had led me to realize that someone had broken into my place when that happened; I only saw that things had been moved if I had reason to need them. And the Red Death Bathroom was generally unsettling enough that I found it hard to pick out anything strange. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for either. Maybe blood, maybe something else. The room was too red to see blood easily, and I had no idea what else to look for. Maybe the sound had just been my own paranoia. There didn’t seem to be any sign of trouble, much less a gun fight.  
  
I sighed. “Sorry. I guess I was hearing things.”  
  
* * *  
  
He looked so dejected when he said that, standing in my bathroom in his white shirt and tan pants, blonde hair a little fluffed up from earlier. The guy was probably twice my age, several inches taller than me, and he owned the largest pistol I had ever seen and somehow he still made me feel like I had to protect him. Jeez, this was some screwy relationship we had going. We risked our lives through bad luck or, in my case, idiocy, and saved each other while intermittently having awkward conversations and attempting to have sex before fate could intervene. Was this how life normally worked?  
  
It seemed almost unhealthy, but with my luck, I doubted I could hope for anything better. Besides, this was closer to a fairytale than anything I had ever had before. I wasn’t sure if love even existed, but I enjoyed being with Arcade and didn’t care about anything deeper than that at the time. This was nice. What I had with Vulpes was also nice, and for the time being I saw no reason that I shouldn’t continue with both men. Yes, in retrospect, I suppose that decision may have been fairly selfish.  
  
It wasn’t that I didn’t care, I suppose, but more that I didn’t realize or care how much I cared. I do know that seeing how disheartened Arcade looked at that moment made my heart ache and I couldn’t stand to ignore that. “It’s fine. You seem...spooked. And you have a gun: if you’re spooked, it’s probably best to be cautious.”  
v He grinned weakly. “Yeah...probably better safe than sorry...” He looked down at the tile, frowning a little. I interpreted that as self-doubt, a feeling I knew well. If he’d held that expression for just a second longer, I would have hugged him, but that frown suddenly took on a dangerous intensity. “Or not. Is there any reason there’d be blood on your bathroom floor?”  
  
My eyes snapped wide. God damn it, I could have sworn I’d done a better job cleaning up. I scanned the red tile in vain. Everything looked the same in this dim light, even to my keen gaze.  
  
Admitting that someone had more or less broken into my house and had sex with me violently, and not entirely with my consent seemed like a tremendously bad idea, given his panic over some noise he only might have heard. I had to come up with a lie fast. Luckily, I guess, I was a good liar. More luckily, he knew my terrible luck and jumped to a conclusion.  
  
“Does this have anything to do with your mysterious hospital visit a few days ago?”  
  
I nodded awkwardly. This was excellent, now I could mislead him by omission, which made me feel less guilty. It was for his own good anyway.  
  
“What happened?”  
  
Or maybe omission was out of the question. I shrugged, feigning more awkwardness than I was feeling. Damn, how could a man who carried a gun of that caliber look so innocent and thus make me feel so awfully guilty? I hoped for my sake that he never figured out just how much untapped talent he had for guilting me into things. I very nearly told him the truth right then.  
  
“Well, water and tile, one thing leads to another, I guess...” Assume I slipped, assume I slipped, assume I slipped...  
  
He sighed. “I’d really appreciate if you could manage not to hurt yourself every other day, but at the very least, please don’t hide it when it happens. You really had me worried when Julie said you’d told her not to tell me, I thought you might be dying or something.”  
  
My lungs just stopped working for a bit at that confession. Damn. Was he overreacting or was I just a heartless bastard because I’d never worried that much about anyone? It was...endearing. Nothing else he could have said could have convinced me to be honest with him.  
  
At that moment, I would have told him anything, and a large part of me wanted to, but as usual fate had other plans.  
  
* * *  
  
At my words, Jack got a blank look to him that I don’t think I’d ever seen before. That look could have shown anything from horror to flattery to awkwardness. I wasn’t sure if I should expect a kiss, a break-up talk, or something entirely different. Jack was forever enigmatic. He seemed to gather his thoughts, looked down, and the intensity of his expression faded just a little. God dammit, it was probably one of the worse options. Why could I never learn to quit while I was ahead?  
  
Jack hadn’t moved far from the doorway to the bedroom in his investigation of the bathroom, while I, in my more thorough search, had moved towards the tiny windows until my back was towards the painted bull a few feet behind me. Jack opened his mouth to speak and looked back up at me, but something over my shoulder distracted him. He froze, gaping, at a total loss for the second time in that minute.  
  
“You should invest in better locks and an alarm system. I would strongly advise that you find a method of sealing off the balcony in particular.” The voice was flat but familiar, the gravely and terrifying high baritone of that reporter from earlier. I had still forgotten to look him up and made a mental note to do so, but first there was the minor issue that he had materialized seemingly by magic directly behind me. I flinched.  
  
* * *  
  
My own shock at the sudden arrival of my nightmarish paramour paled in comparison to Arcade’s absolute terror. He jumped visibly and his voice box emitted a strangled squeak like a dying mouse. I don’t think he was even conscious of the sound. His eyes couldn’t have managed to get any wider.  
  
I didn’t really blame him; Vulpes exuded menace the way bonfires gave off heat. I would probably have had a heart attack if he showed up behind me that suddenly, even if I was dead certain that he only wanted sex.  
  
I considered his actual words after I got over how drastically Arcade’s adorable horror intensified my attraction to him. He wanted me to get some kind of security system? Well, damn, that was a twist I hadn’t expected. Did he actually care what happened to me? Seriously? Was he really not constantly on the verge of killing me? What?  
  
Arcade interrupted my thoughts, frowning at the eerily calm invader. “Has he been in here all along?”  
  
“No.” I studied Vulpes. Something seemed off about his posture, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “He keeps coming in through the balcony.”  
  
* * *  
  
I frowned at him. “The balcony?”  
  
“Yeah. The creepy painting works like a door.”  
  
The journalist chimed in with a strange tone to his voice. His mood was more difficult to read than ancient Babylonian. “You consider it to be `creepy’?”  
  
Jack raised one slender eyebrow. “Um, yeah. Don’t you? I mean, I can appreciate the technique, and I wouldn’t just throw it out or something, but I find it fairly disturbing to have a large bull glaring at me while I bathe.”  
  
That statement steered my thoughts to an absurd imagining that the paintings eyes could be removed, like in cheesy old mysteries, allowing this frightening journalist to watch Jack. I dismissed it immediately, but it still disturbed me. Not only did Jack own the most terrifying house I had ever seen, but that house came with a secret passage behind an equally alarming painting and a man who arrived like a phantom and could probably spy on Jack just as easily as he could murder him. I found myself a bit unnerved by how much my fear for his safety came mixed with an intense emotion that bordered on envy. The idea that this creepy journalist might be stalking Jack gnawed at my mind like a starving rat. If it weren’t for the fact that I doubted such conjecture had any basis in reality, I might have punched him.  
  
At the same time, my brain took on another thought, far more awkward than enraging. That was the mental image of Jack bathing.  
  
Fighting a blush, I scrutinized the new arrival. If he could get in on his own, maybe I hadn’t imagined the sound.  
He was armed; I caught the faint bulge of a large pistol inside his loose jacket and what could only be a machete strapped to his thigh. They were expertly concealed. That scared me almost as much as the weapons themselves, almost as much as his lethal air. My pistol was still on the counter, well out of my reach. Shit.  
  
And yet Jack seemed almost calm. He was totally okay with this armed acquaintance randomly breaking into his house. God damn it, Jack! Would he ever develop some sense of self-preservation?  
  
To make matters worse, the journalist kept one hand inside his jacket, in the side where he had the gun. Something was a bit off about his posture, but I hardly noticed. The gun was much more concerning.  
  
Okay, I had to get involved, technically I was already involved. Even if Jack didn’t care about his own life, I did, and I would damn well make him care. I was going to involve myself in this as of now, whatever doubts I had about Jack’s maturity. He needed someone. He was going to get himself killed if he didn’t have someone to keep an eye on him. At the very least, I could make sure he didn’t starve.  
  
* * *  
  
I could tell Arcade was lost in thought from the subtle shifts in his expression and Vulpes likewise seemed distracted. He watched us both in absolute silence, standing slightly hunched with one hand on his side. At first I’d expected him to kill or rape me, with those intentions evolving into either a massacre or an orgy once he saw Arcade. Now I wasn’t sure. Maybe he really had come here out of simple concern for my safety. Or maybe not.  
  
“You didn’t seem to care that I never locked my doors before. Why the change?”  
  
He took a moment to answer. The slightest hint of a frown knitted his fine brows. That seemed strange. He almost looked like he was in pain. “You may be in danger.” His reply was simple and guarded. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I caught on that he’d relaxed a bit when we’d talked on my bed. He’d locked me out again now and chose his words carefully. Was it just because of Arcade?  
  
Arcade stayed quiet. He watched Vulpes the way a giraffe watched a lion. I half expected him to dive for his gun.  
  
“Why am I in more danger now than I was earlier?”  
  
He started to answer, but stopped suddenly. His eyes unfocused. He shifted forward slightly. That was odd, he looked almost like he was about to pass out.  
  
Vulpes Inculta collapsed onto the hard tile floor, landing face down and leaving both me and Arcade staring in stunned disbelief.  
  
“Okay, maybe I don’t need to shoot him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song by the All American Rejects, and sorry that it got so incredibly long... ^w^'


	14. Why Did I Have to Break In?  I Only Came Here to Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "The Old Apartment" by the Bare Naked Ladies. The song seems fairly appropriate for a lot of reasons.

* * *

Normally, I tried to help people who lost consciousness around me, but in this case I made an exception.

Or at least I would have if Jack hadn’t pointed out that things would be worse if the journalist died. He was right: if he died, there’d have to be an investigation and blame would probably fall to me or Jack. And my past would probably come to light. For the same reasons, taking him to the hospital was also out of the question. I guess it was a good thing that I could usually operate pretty well without ideal conditions. In this case, I meant that literally.

Jack’s stories hadn’t played up his uselessness in crises; confronted with an unconscious man in his bathroom he nearly panicked and looked to me for instruction, although at least he helped effectively when asked. With his propensity for finding danger, I had to wonder how he had ever managed to survive this long. It wasn’t necessarily panic that made him useless, but rather inexperience and uncertainty. With no idea what to do, he froze, and that just made him an obstacle, although I guess most people didn’t have my experience with dealing with emergencies. Even Jack, apparently. Or maybe he was just used to having his mother around. From what he had said about her, I wouldn’t be surprised if the woman had ordered him through any previous crises he’d been in. On the other hand, he might just be used to the sort of disaster that mandated either combat or escape and rendered such knowledge-driven actions as medical treatment impractical to say the least. He had, after all, apparently been attacked by wild animals and survived the crashes of various vehicles. That probably could teach him to act based on instinct more so than rational thought.

Eventually, we got the journalist up onto the red tile counter and I took a look at him. It was a gunshot. The bullet had embedded just below the iliac crest of his pelvis after tearing down through his abdomen. He’d been uncannily lucky; the bullet had nearly missed him, so its diagonal path ran almost exclusively through muscle. The man had very little fat on his body, so the wound was easy enough for me to trace. The bullet had passed so close to the skin that the trail itself could almost be seen and I could feel the hard shape of the projectile against the bone. A fraction of an inch inward and it would have ruptured his intestines, more than halving his chances of survival. As it was, he’d just have trouble sitting up or bending over until the muscles healed. Aside from the usual risks and difficulties of surgery, of course.

Cleaning and bandaging the wound was a fairly simple matter, considering how bad it could have been. It concerned me more that he had so little body fat. I was no fan of a man who randomly broke into Jack’s house for who knows what reasons, but anyone with that little fat and that much muscle was either a crazed athlete or someone living an extremely hard life.

With some help from Jack, I patched him up as best as I could and tightly bandaged his abdomen. Hopefully, for our sake, he wouldn’t turn out to be allergic to morphine, because I felt I had to give him some. Otherwise he would have woken up in agony, and as much as he probably deserved it, I couldn’t do that to anyone. At least I thought at the time that I couldn’t. I guess the things that happened in the months after that took a toll on my morality.

With the journalist stable and unconscious on a table in Jack’s studio, Jack and I went back downstairs. Personally, I’d have preferred to stay upstairs and keep an eye on the creepy houseguest, but Jack wanted cake and I didn’t voice my concerns out of the hope that the home-invader might somehow disappear while we weren’t watching. He’d probably push his body too far and die if he left, which was a depressing thought, as much as part of me might have hoped he would.

Jack and I ate silently for a while, both lost in our own thoughts before, as usual, he interjected an idea. “Do you think a large bookshelf would fit in front of that painting door?”

My thoughts took a moment to switch tracks to that. At least this time I could see where he was coming from. “...um, probably. Exactly how long have you known that painting was a door and why did you never bother to lock it?”

* * *

 _Fuuuuuck..._ I just _knew_ he’d been going to ask. What the hell should I say? `I’ve known for a while, but I quite enjoy giving a probably-homicidal well-hung stranger easy access to my home, mostly because of the arguably-consensual sex.’ Oh, the truth would go over _wonderfully_. Well, I couldn’t feign ignorance: I clearly knew that was a door. Maybe I could feign stupidity? I mean, I was no genius by any means, I had vast knowledge about several very specific topics, but I definitely had my idiotic moments. The question now was, would he believe that? Maybe. Oh, who was I kidding? I seemed like a pathetic imbecile especially when I was trying to impress someone I was attracted to; he probably wouldn’t even be surprised.

* * *

Jack hesitated and stared at me blankly. “...I just never really thought of a good way to lock it until now...” Now it was my turn to stare. The guy was smart enough to get into one of the best colleges in the world in a fairly complex program, he’d already demonstrated his intellect, and yet he couldn’t figure out how to block a door? Wait a second. He’d already done that to his front door, there was no way he’d have trouble barring the painting. Right? Was he lying or was this just the kind of selective idiocy that sometimes made me wonder where I’d left my phone when it was in my pocket? Everyone had their moments, right? I didn’t want to believe that he had reason to lie to me about this, or that he was such a good liar. Looking at him, he seemed completely honest. If he was lying, the only reason I could imagine would be that he had reason to want the door left open, which suggested a recklessness that bordered on suicidal with his luck and experience with this city so far. The man somehow had terrorists out to get him, and he hadn’t even seemed surprised when a probably-psychopathic journalist showed up in his bathroom with a gunshot wound.

That was also worrying, even if he was telling the truth about the door. If Jack was totally fine with people breaking into his house, some of whom might have dangerous intentions, and especially as he didn’t seem surprised when one arrived badly wounded, the best case scenario seemed to be that he was just naive. I suppose that could be possible; he had mentioned something about not needing to lock his doors, and the guy had apparently grown up around quite a few big dogs, so the idea that he might never expect people to break into his house wasn’t out of the question. On the other hand, if he was really aware of the possibility and how dangerous it could be, that was more worrying. If that was the truth, Jack was probably suicidal. With all his trauma and previously demonstrated lack of concern for his own safety, that seemed alarmingly likely.

He glanced around, clearly grasping for a change of subject. “...I-I’ll get a bookcase up there to block it, then. ...Um...wait a second, last time we saw each other there was kind of a fire at your apartment building. ...Everything okay with that now?”

Could he ever find a change of topic that didn’t involve bad memories for someone? I found myself grinning at the sheer awkwardness of him. There was no way he could have been lying earlier; he was too socially inept for that. “Jack, we need to work on your conversation skills.” The seriousness of his question sunk in and now I felt awkward. “Well...nothing was damaged, but the building had to be condemned. I’ve been living out of a hotel for a bit until I find a new place, but it was probably worse for everyone else who used to live there. At least I can _afford_ a new place.”

Given what I knew of his background, I’d expected him to either overreact because he had only ever been without shelter in dangerous wilderness like Africa and Siberia, or to dismiss it with no reaction at all because he simply couldn’t imagine what that was like, having lived in what sounded like a sprawling estate for most of his life. Instead, Jack fell somewhere between the two extremes. He looked concerned. “You okay? I mean, if you need a place to stay...”

I raised an eyebrow as he paused, fairly shocked by the strongly implied offer— granted, there’d been a lot of dire circumstances in the short time we’d known each other, but this was still only our first real date.

* * *

Shit! What had I said now? “...I mean, not if that’d be awkward or anything, just I have the space, and you need a place to stay, not that there’s anything wrong with a hotel, I mean, I’ve done that myself, I mean, I’ve done worse, I mean, I just thought—” Arcade silenced my backpedaling with a kiss.

“You know, you should probably trust your instincts. I’m no expert, but from what I’ve seen you seem to get it right the first time.” I blushed and stared at him, slowly realizing the magnitude of what I’d just suggested. This wasn’t the first time that my mouth had gotten well ahead of my conscious thought, but, as usual, it was accurate. The idea of living with him tantalized me.

* * *

I’d half expected things to progress beyond that kiss, but Jack just stared blankly, apparently dazed by it and the moment passed. I cleared the table for the sake of finding something to do to break the awkward moment.

Jack seemed to move unprecedentedly fast in a relationship; I was honestly surprised that we hadn’t managed to actually have sex yet, depending on how that was defined anyway. It struck me as amusing how quickly he made advances in all other ways while I was used to the opposite. This would be the first time that I’d be moving in with someone before we’d actually “done the deed” as it were, and definitely the first time I’d moved in after barely two weeks, if that. Then again, everything about Jack tended to be atypical, why would my relationship with him prove any different?

Living with him would no doubt be exciting, if nothing else, at the very least because of the painting door and frequent break-ins. On one hand, that worried me a little, but on the other, I probably carried a higher caliber pistol than they did. Having me here would hopefully keep Jack safe from anyone breaking into his house and I’d also be able to make sure he took care of himself. I’m not sure if I felt more like his boyfriend or his parent, in that regard. Hopefully the former would still outweigh the latter. Otherwise things would just be awkward. Well, more awkward. At least living with Jack would be better than a hotel.

* * *

I was just thinking of standing to pull him into another kiss and hopefully progress beyond that when he started to clear the table. I guess that wasn’t something he had in mind tonight. I guess that made sense, I mean, we still had an unconscious Vulpes upstairs. I guess sex was just out of the question because of that.

“So...that’s a yes, right? You’re moving in with me?” It felt weird to say that. This was my house. This was my much-older boyfriend. In America. Surrounded by stuff that I actually owned. A country away from any family members that I knew of. An _ocean_ away. Damn.

* * *

“Yes. As long as you’re alright with that.” He had a strange look to him, almost like that hollow look he got when he was thinking of one of his many traumas. What the hell had set him off now? As much as I cared about him and couldn’t stand to watch pretty much anyone suffer, it was just a little annoying that every conversation became a minefield around him and one wrong word could practically bring him to tears.

Whatever memories had been stirred kept Jack stilled for a moment longer before he looked up and registered what I had said. His eyes kept a ghost of that haunted look, but he broke into a wider grin than I’d seen on him all day. “Of course. I’d love to have you stay.”

* * *

I’m not sure, but I think we would probably have kissed again then if a thud from upstairs hadn’t interrupted us. Oh, great, now Vulpes was cock-blocking me.

Arcade sighed. “I guess we’d best go check up on him...”

I’m not sure exactly what I expected to find upstairs, but somehow it unnerved me to find Vulpes unconscious again and bleeding halfway to the bathroom painting. Arcade checked him out.

Granted, I _had_ undergone at least some of the training to be a veterinarian, but stomach wounds were not my strong suit; I could splint, cast, stitch, bandage, and amputate pretty much any limb of any species, but once the chest or abdomen got involved I was way out of my depth. Besides, I knew next to nothing about _human_ internal anatomy. And intestines managed to turn my normally strong stomach somehow. And treating humans sometimes gave me flashbacks. There were many reasons that I just left this to Arcade.

“You alright?”

I’d been staring at Vulpes, not seeing him as I thought, jaw locked tensely. I probably looked a bit ill, but that was mostly memories. Arcade stared up at me worriedly.

I closed my eyes and exhaled, shaking off the feeling. “I’m fine.”

He gave me that look again and I knew he quickly realized that I wasn’t going to explain. He still hazarded a guess, but I expected that. One of the things I liked the most about him was that curiosity, even if thus far I wasn’t ready to answer most of his questions. I needed that prying intellect. For all my life I’d always kept everything to myself. That was part of how I’d ended up like this. I needed someone who would keep asking so that I wouldn’t keep everything inside forever.

* * *

I hazarded a guess. “Does this have something to do with your PTSD?”

He bobbled his head. “Partly.” He avoided looking at Vulpes directly. I could tell that he was feeling better even if he still looked a bit green. Was this bringing back bad memories or was he just squeamish?

My phone rang and I muted it, still focused on Jack. “Would you be able to help me get him back to the table?”

Jack started to answer but was interrupted as the journalist woke up again. His body tensed and he lay very still. He didn’t actively grimace, but the tautness of his expression made his agony obvious. “I must leave. Heal me so I can go.” The way he spoke, every word was a struggle to force through gritted teeth. Maybe I’d misjudged the morphine a bit.

“At the moment, I highly doubt you can even stand. You’re staying here until you heal enough to move, whether you want to or not.”

If looks could kill, the journalist’s glare could have produced a nuclear holocaust, but he said nothing, presumably recognizing the truth in that remark.

He’d torn open the stitches and widened the wound when he’d made for the door. I fixed the damage as best as I could, but it wasn’t perfect. Until the skin and muscle healed enough to support his organs, he couldn’t sit up without risking even greater injury. He passed out again as I patched him up and I gave him some more morphine. Getting him back onto the table, I clarified to Jack, “Unfortunately, he might be here for a while...”

“That’s fine.”

I stared at him. It seemed like an unusual response. A home-invader passes out because of a gunshot and he’s totally fine with keeping him around until he heals? Admittedly, the man could hardly pose a threat when he couldn’t even sit up, but I wasn’t comfortable leaving him here, and I wasn’t the one who would have to live with him for a few days or at least a few hours.

“The guy breaks into your house and you’re okay with putting him up for a few days or so?”

Jack shrugged. “He hasn’t actively threatened me. Besides, do I really have a choice?”

He had a point, I guess, although the journalist sure seemed threatening even if he hadn’t, say, pulled a gun on Jack. And then it occurred to me that Jack hadn’t even suggested taking him to the hospital. I had reasons not to, but, as far as I knew, he didn’t. Unless he knew about my reasons. No. That was absurd. Maybe he had reasons of his own. Or didn’t like cops. Or just hadn’t thought of it.

* * *

He got quiet after I answered, clearly thinking about something. Did he suspect that something had already happened between me and Vulpes? The idea mortified me as much as I doubted it. How would he know that? Unless he had actually gone through my medical records, which was possible, I supposed, although he seemed too moral to do that. I’d been trusting that his ethics would keep him from finding out that way, or possibly from learning about anything else to do with my past; I didn’t really know if he’d be able to find that sort of stuff by any means he had access to anyway. I wasn’t even really sure if I cared if he knew. I cared if he knew about Vulpes because that would probably piss him off, but if he found out about my past... I didn’t want to tell him because the act of voicing those memories would still be too much, too painful for me too speak right now, but if he found out on his own, that would be more of a relief than a horror.

But Vulpes was definitely still in the category of secret-I-intended-to-keep, so I started talking to gloss over whatever I’d said that had gotten him thinking. “So he’ll just need a few days or so to rest up here and heal, right?” I remembered what we’d been talking about earlier as I said that and added awkwardly, “...Are you planning on moving in tomorrow?”

I could tell that that second query had successfully shifted the subject of his musings. Arcade, who had been frowning slightly, as he tended to do when thinking, widened his eyes a little. At least I wasn’t the only one a bit uncertain about this. I mean, I did want him in a lot of ways, the question was how that would effect what I had with Vulpes. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to choose between them, or if I had to, or even if I could, given Vulpes’ forceful and probably homicidal nature. On top of that, I wasn’t sure how well I could live with anyone. Living with my family, I’d pretty much kept to my room whenever possible and stayed both as hidden and as nocturnal as possible, which didn’t give much frame of reference for living in a much smaller house and sharing everything including my bed with someone. In college, I’d basically barricaded myself behind furniture and avoided my roommates, although I’d still gotten the strong impression that they hated me, although I had no idea why. They’d probably given me subtle hints I’d never noticed. At least, that was the sort of thing my family had sometimes done, until they’d realized how utterly oblivious I usually was. At least in regard to that kind of thing. I could spot a cat fifty meters off and usually identify the breed at the same distance, but things like dirty dishes and laundry flew under my radar. Hopefully this snap decision of mine wouldn’t end up like my family life.

* * *

Jack had blindsided me with that question. Oh. Right. I was moving in with him. The whole injured-home-invader situation had driven it from my mind for a few minutes.

“...Yeah. Tomorrow’s probably good. Would you be awake if I move in after work?”

And I’d be moving in with him while he had a probably murderous injured journalist in his studio. Lovely. Real fairy-tale romance this was shaping up to be.

* * *

I had to do the math. He worked nights, right? So he’d probably move in early tomorrow. It was about eight now. He’d most likely be done with work around five or six the next morning. “I should be. That sounds like a good time.”

Wait a second, tomorrow was the thirtieth. I glanced at the unconscious journalist. With this injury, Vulpes’ party invitation was probably canceled, although I was more concerned about his health than the idea of a Halloween party— heck, his idea of a party might be terrifying, like torture or bloodsport or something. Although I had to admit that still sounded kinda fun.

But Vulpes was stubborn, or at least he seemed to be. I wouldn’t be too surprised if he still tried to take me to this party he’d mentioned.

* * *

Jack got thinking about something, I suspected the logistics of having me move in, and I remembered that my phone had rang earlier. I checked it.

Garrett had texted me and as soon as I opened the message I knew he was drunk. Massively drunk. That was pretty typical for him when he wasn’t working or driving. The guy ran a bar for a reason.

It took me twelve tries to get the gist of his text. Apparently, he’d invited me to some party the Wrangler was having on Halloween. It sounded like he’d sent me letters but they hadn’t gotten to me, probably because I no longer had an apartment. The details were vague, which was also typical of him, but I managed to figure out the basics. Date, time, place, that sort of thing. He had one more coherent sentence tacked on at the end, an apparent afterthought. This one was clearly typed and from that I suspected his sister had taken his phone to add it. She was usually sober. It read simply, “And feel free to bring that fine piece of ass with you.”

The wording made me sigh aloud. Knowing them, that probably referred to Jack. James would have no doubt passed that bit of gossip to half the neighborhood by now, so Francine surely knew. She also would realize that he was “off-limits” to them, if I was dating him— or at least to her and probably to James, although there had been a few times that he’d gotten me drunk enough to talk me into a threesome with himself and whoever I was dating at the time. Francine probably wanted him there for less direct reasons; she sometimes mentioned that she preferred eye-candy she couldn’t touch to the possibility of a commitment. There were many reasons she and her brother got along so well.

Jack still seemed distracted when I finished reading. The Wrangler’s parties were often crazy, but they were always entertaining and that would at least be something to do with Jack aside from just basically living together.

“So Garrett’s having a Halloween party, apparently. Do you want to go?”

Jack hesitated. “When?”

He had plans? Well, I guess that was fairly normal, it wasn’t like he did nothing but paint and forget to eat and sleep, I suppose. That still surprised me. What did he do? Oh, right. He somehow earned enough money to live here, and if I was sticking to my theory of prostitution, he probably had to do that at some point. Hopefully not for much longer. Maybe I could change that while I made sure that he took care of himself. And probably slept with him. Hopefully slept with him. And just spent time with him. And kept people from breaking in to his home. Right. Jack was just surrounded by problems.

I checked the text. “Around eight on the thirty-first. So Halloween night.”

Jack nodded. “Sounds fun. He seems like an entertaining guy, at least from what I remember through the painkillers and head injuries.”

“So it’s a date then. I’ll tell him.” I texted Garrett the gist of that conclusion with an added note that I couldn’t be reached by mail and a warning not to ask. Figuring he’d ask anyway, I silenced my phone. I checked the time first.

Jack stayed silent. But this time he was looking at me, so I couldn’t be sure if he was lost in thoughts again or just not sure what to say. The journalist was still out cold, but he was still there, so I didn’t feel right even considering sex right now. Well, maybe considering it, but no more than that.

“So, you need any help barring the painting-door?”

Jack shook his head. “Nah. Figured I’d just throw a bookshelf in front of it.” He wasn’t being sarcastic.

I eyed him skeptically. “With a broken arm?”

* * *

I did actually plan to move a bookshelf within an hour or so. Probably as soon as he left, he was planning on leaving, wasn’t he? I mean, he’d said something about getting his stuff, so I’d presumed he wouldn’t be staying. I could disassemble the bookcase to move it. That didn’t seem that difficult to _me_...

I nodded. That dubious stare intensified.

“Really? Are you sure you don’t need help? I’m not sure I can trust you not to hurt yourself by trying that, given your track record.” He was half joking, but I could tell he was concerned and his point was valid enough.

I sighed. “...Okay, maybe I could use some help. You have time now?”

His expression made his answer clear. “Jack, I’m hardly about to leave you alone with a burglar and a door you can’t lock or block.”

I should have expected that. This was a matter of safety, I supposed. Even Vulpes had, for some reason, asked me to lock that door. Who shot him, anyway?

We disassembled one of the bookshelves, piling the former owner’s books on my couch for the time being and moved it up to reassemble it in from of the painting. Arcade had been right, I probably wouldn’t have been able to haul the larger sections up the stairs on my own with one good arm. With the whole thing finally in place, he checked the time again. “Well, I’ll need to start a twelve hour shift in about eight hours, so...” He trailed off, looking at me and I nodded. I was fairly strong but hauling the bits of shelf around had me panting and I caught my breath before answering.

“Yeah, you should get some sleep. I’ll put some books and stuff on the shelf so it won’t move.”

He nodded pointedly towards my studio where Vulpes was still out cold, or at least silent. “You sure you’ll be okay?”

I nodded. Don’t worry, if he wakes up, he’ll just rape me, no harm done. Though I still wasn’t sure if that was really rape or just sex. “I’ll be fine.”

He’d left his gun on the bathroom counter and I’d forgotten it, but now he picked it up and tucked it carefully beneath his belt. The move seemed so casual and practiced and yet it left the gun virtually invisible. Even looking for it I could hardly see the outline beneath the fabric. That scared me a little. Not only did he carry a very large pistol, but he was so used to doing so that he stowed it as expertly as a life-long sailor tied a cleat hitch. Why was he so good with a gun, anyway?

He seemed to guess the nature of my thoughts, because he started awkwardly towards the stairs. “Well...I should go. See you tomorrow, Jack.” That snapped me out of my concern about his gun. Thus far he’d only said my name in admonition, but now he said it almost...tenderly. Yes, I think that was the right word for his tone. I wasn’t used to that tone. Ven hadn’t exactly been the loving kind, frankly the more I thought about him without the rose-tinted lenses of infatuation, the more I realized how much of an asshole Ven had always been. If it weren’t for sheer circumstance, I would surely have despised the man. My mother, on the other hand, never used direct address with me unless she was angry. The only time I had ever heard her use my name it had been screamed at me. My sister generally called me “bro”, although she was at least affectionate about that. I couldn’t remember if my dad had ever used my name. Hearing my name used in such an affectionate tone was a new experience for me.

I smiled at him, probably more happily than I usually did, although it was still bittersweet. “I look forward to it.”

With Arcade gone, I had a lot to do. Moving the books upstairs to the newly reassembled shelf took less effort than I’d expected and I organized them by topic in the process. Whoever used to live here seemed strangely obsessed with philosophy, politics, and religion. I hated two of the three topics, so the various religious and political texts took up the bottom shelves as literary bricks to stabilize the rack. I arranged the philosophical volumes above them, paging through a few as I put them away. With most of my few books hidden elsewhere, I only had the top shelf filled by literature that hadn’t come with the house. Of them, most were veterinary texts I used as anatomical references for my art. Three were basic reference books: a massive thesaurus, an encyclopedia of literary tropes, and a gigantic volume on writing. The rest were my favorite novels. I’d read a lot before college, before I really started writing, but hadn’t found the time in over a year. Supposedly, my writing would suffer for that, but I hadn’t yet noticed a difference. Maybe keeping them in the bathroom would let me think to read at some point when there was nothing else I could do. Now that I had a bathtub, I might start reading while I bathed, I supposed. It was better than bringing paints or my laptop into the tub.

Walking back into my bedroom as I wondered what to do next, my eyes fell upon Vulpes, still out cold on the table. There were a lot of possibilities there, too, and I doubted I’d have him unconscious again. I also doubted that a simple gunshot would stop him from killing me if he caught me taking advantage of him. Let’s just wait until he was conscious.

Well aware that I had at most fifteen hours before Arcade moved in, I saw my house in a new light. Damn, I was really a slob, my mother had been right all along. Between the scattered clothing, the forgotten plates and day-old mugs of tea, I had a lot of work to do. Luckily, I’d just slept about twenty hours before dinner, so I was awake enough to do that. Cleaning the house took me well into the night. Laundry and dishes were washed and stowed, floors were swept, the fridge was scrubbed and organized, I made the bed, and I even dusted. Rex mourned the loss of the laundry piles but appreciated the dog bed I moved upstairs. He had two others downstairs anyway. This place was actually starting to feel like home now that I had a dog. Maybe it would feel more like home once Arcade was living with me.

Vulpes didn’t stir while I cleaned, even when I ran the vacuum. That started to worry me so I checked on him. His pulse was slow, but not too slow. As long as his wound was closed, cleaned, and covered, I didn’t have any problem around him. He seemed to be asleep, unsurprisingly, I supposed. Arcade might have given him too much morphine and knocked him out. That was probably why he was so unresponsive right now.

Thinking I might be done, I did one last check of the house. Oh. Right. A wall of paper-back books covered part of my dresser, a black leather riding crop hung from a hook on the wall beside the bed, and a very suspicious and out-of-place black cabinet lurked beneath my desk. Aside from the books, I’d bought them all out of wishful thinking and never actually used any of them. They were also decently hidden and Arcade hadn’t seemed to have noticed them yet, but I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t notice eventually. I piled the books in a cardboard box and slid them under the bed. The riding crop and the cabinet got lugged through my studio to the massive storage room beyond it where I kept all my extra paints and canvases. I was better stocked than an art store, at this point; I didn’t expect Arcade to ever have reason to sift through my supplies long enough to find what I’d just hidden.

Rex got up and nosed me so I let him outside and fed and watered him. Nearly out of dog food and even more nearly out of people food, I pet Rex goodbye and walked down the street for some groceries. Aside from having to carry twenty heavy, over-full bags with a broken arm, the trip was uneventful. Vulpes still hadn’t moved when I got back and I didn’t hear him as I put stuff away. By that point it was ten at night, and I was exhausted. I scarfed down a sandwich as dinner and wet upstairs. Vulpes still looked dead on the table. He’d probably be like that all night, or so I assumed.

Eleven pm now. I felt like I was about to pass out; I needed sleep. Arcade would be off work around five so I set my alarm to four, just in case, and went to bed. I don’t even remember laying down before I fell asleep.

My alarm woke me with the jarring first beats of Verruckt. I’d left my phone on my bathroom counter, out of reach so I couldn’t just shut it off without getting out of bed. The sound hit me like an electric shock and I spasmed to kick the blankets off. Nearly falling to the floor, I somehow got my legs underneath me and walked to turn my alarm off with all the grace of a car-struck fawn on six bottles of absinthe. Standing in the dark silence of the predawn, my eyes slowly adjusted. I realized that I’d jumped over the space where my laundry used to be. That would take some getting used to.

The house was not as I had left it. A cushion I had left sitting on my desk chair, the only chair in the relatively cramped room, now rested on my table and the chair had been turned to face the bed. The curtain shielding my studio from view had been pulled back and the painting I’d done for Vulpes was gone, as was the man himself. He’d left the stone stallion on my bedside table on top of a brief note written in neat and tiny handwriting on a scrap of paper from one of the notepads I used to sketch painting ideas. The horse seemed to serve as the greeting. That seemed oddly appropriate as I often used a horse to represent myself in my art, although I doubted he had picked up on that, and there was no way that he could know the figurine’s origin. The message was short and surprising. “See you tomorrow at seven.” The party was still on, apparently. Assuming he was okay. As with the greeting, his signature was as simple as it was unusual: he had sketched a fox on the bottom of the note. Rendered in cheap but effective ball-point pen, the slim vulpine stared out from the page, almost grinning. He’d rendered the markings and shadows in perfect greyscale and the animal was clearly a fox, but his style differed from mine. My art tended towards photorealism with subtle adjustments. Oddly, his style traded accuracy for distortion, creating a vivid sense of movement, emotion, and life. My art mirrored taxidermy with only subtle abstraction lending it an eerie hint of the animate. His art seemed as immanently active as he did. The fox looked ready to slink right off the page, no doubt to take on a role reminiscent of the Cheshire cat. That vitality reminded me of something.

In the same way this sketch seemed ready to deceive, the painted bull looked ready to stampede. He had painted that door. The thought led me to wonder where he had gone. The shelf was still in place and he could have no more moved it than I could. He had left by the front door, I presumed. I found Rex anxiously waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. I’d brought him up to bed with me, but he must have followed Vulpes to the door and now he couldn’t get back up. At least he hadn’t barked to wake me, although I almost wished that he had. I hoped Vulpes would meet me tomorrow. I hoped that he would be okay.


	15. Photograph

With an hour to go until Arcade got off from work, I planned to stay awake.  Moving him in would be a bit of a project, I suspected, and then we’d probably both be tired and hungry— not that I wasn’t already, heck, both of us probably were.  I felt worse than if I hadn’t slept at all, I realized, but I had ways to fix that and to keep myself from falling back asleep even after I took half a dose of painkiller for my arm.  

This called for tea and terror.  

About three hours later I got a text.  By that point I sat curled up beneath a blanket in my dark living room, all lights off except my TV.  Rex watched me from his bed, no doubt concerned by my reactions.  Dogs didn’t understand survival horror games, in the dark, at six in the morning, after three cups of tea and half a dose of painkiller.  I could fall asleep under just about any circumstances, and given how tired I was now, I’d gotten paranoid that I wouldn’t hear my phone.  The best solution for this, as I had learned, was caffeine and horror games, specifically Amnesia: the Dark Descent.  

I heard my phone alright.  For the second time that morning, heavy metal rent the silence and shot my heart into my throat.  Stifling a yelp, I nearly fell off the sofa, barely kept a hold of my controller, and in the game I proceeded in rapid succession to collide with a wall, sprint for a door, and die to a monster by frantically trying to push a pull door.  As the reload screen came up, I turned it off.  I’d saved recently enough anyway, it wasn’t like I’d made progress since then.  

Praying my heart would stop pounding, I checked the message.  

Arcade was here.  My frenzied heartbeat wouldn’t slow down, but now that wasn’t due to fear.  I was about to help my boyfriend move in to my house.  With me.  At first, the nerves were just due to the sheer novelty of that idea, the novelty of the reminder that I owned the house as well, but then another thought occurred to me.  This was the first time I would be living with anyone expect for family and awful college roommates, and it would be the first time that I would be doing so in a home I owned, but there was also a chance, however slim, that this would also be the _last_ time for that.  There was a possibility that I might live with Arcade for the rest of my life.  Or be with Vulpes romantically for the same duration, although he’d probably never actually move in, preferring to invade whenever he felt like it.  I dismissed both conclusions as absurdly wishful thinking.  Seriously, Arcade was roughly twice my age and Vulpes was homicidal and probably had no interest in a relationship beyond sex and interrogation.  Although the party invitation might disprove the latter.  I shook off such quixotic musings.  That was still doubtful for either of them, regardless of circumstance.  Lifelong love was a fantasy.  A fantasy I often bought into and wrote about, a fantasy I wished were true, but a fantasy nonetheless.  Then again, “life-long” might not be that long, given my way of attracting danger.  Hopefully I’d somehow beat the odds and at least reach fifty.  Fifty might be pushing it, I’d be happy at thirty.  Hopefully I wouldn’t get a jet turbine dropped on me sometime before then or something.  

Moving him in turned out to be much less eventful than I’d expected.  He didn’t really have much to move; the full list of his possessions consisted mostly of books and clothing now that he’d sold the furniture he no longer needed.  He’d sold the furniture earlier, apparently he hadn’t been able to find anywhere to keep it after he ended up living in a hotel.  I could live pretty barebones myself— I had on many occasions, but he still made me look like a pack rat and I’d moved here with just three bags.  It only took us one trip to get everything inside.  

Alone in interest among his things was one large and mysterious old lockbox.  He glossed over it when I asked, just saying it was something he’d had for a while as if it was insignificant.  He still got that evasive look to him when he said that and followed it up with one of his usual sarcastic jokes, so I made assumptions.  I had my own “mysterious” cabinet that I’d already hidden from him, so I figured this must be his equivalent and asked no further.  

With the stuff piled in my dimly-lit entrance hall, Arcade and I stared at each other and caught our breath.  He had a fairly tiny suitcase of clothing, five large and heavy boxes of books, a box of dishes, mugs, and silverware with some other kitchen items, seven framed prints of art and photos, the mysterious lockbox, and a small and heavy satchel that apparently contained a laptop.  He also had looked extremely tired since he’d arrived.  I wondered if something had delayed him getting to sleep after he’d left yesterday.  

“You okay?”  Even though there wasn’t much to unpack, I was also pretty weary and a few minutes resting in the hallway seemed more than necessary.  

He sighed.  The sound and his expression conveyed the same mix of aggravation and exhaustion I had come to expect from my mother.  Oh, god, I was dating my mother.  At least he lacked her bad qualities, or at least he seemed to.  Hopefully I was correct in that assumption.  

“Let’s just say it hasn’t been a good day.  Night.  Whatever.”  

*      *      *

_That_ was the understatement of the century.  Traffic and roadwork had kept me from getting back to the hotel until almost one, the people in the neighboring rooms had kept me awake for a while longer, which meant that I was running on less than three hours of sleep.  Another sixteen patients had died during my shift and a man had been brought in after apparently being mauled by a bear.  He’d died less than an hour after arriving, but the bear still hadn’t been found.  Traffic had vexed me on the way back to the hotel and on the way to Jack’s and I’d been delayed in checking out and paying by a mother with a screaming child, a gum-chewing tourist on a cell phone, an angry woman with a wildly barking pomeranian, and a receptionist who only spoke Spanish.  The former three had all needed to speak extensively to the latter sorting out a clogged toilet, ascertaining the thread count of the sheets, and insisting that even though dogs weren’t allowed, small, obnoxious dogs owned by bossy women were clearly the exception to this rule.  When I had finally gotten to speak to the overwhelmed receptionist it had taken nearly an hour of mixed Latin, English and the dozen words of Spanish that I knew to actually get everything sorted out and leave.  Needless to say, by this point my normally pretty extensive patience was wearing thin.  

Jack seemed to pick up on this.  As usual, he hesitated, clearly considering something although I was too out-of-it by that point to guess what.  He crossed the hall in one graceful stride and hugged me.  Somehow, I really hadn’t expected that.  

*       *       *

For a long moment I feared that I’d just annoy him more by hugging him, but then Arcade slowly lifted his arms to hug me back.  He rested his chin on my head and I could feel him slowly relax.  

I’m not sure how long we stood like that, gently leaning on each other, but I think we both needed the reprieve.  Eventually, I pulled away.  We should put things away and get to sleep if I had any chance of having time to get ready for the party Vulpes would hopefully be taking me to that night.  I considered the pile, unsure where to begin.  Which of us determined where things went, anyway?  Or was it a group effort?  

*      *       *

That hug worked miracles.  Granted, I was still exhausted and not overjoyed or anything, and I still might have punched anyone too annoying, but at least all the frustration and hopelessness I’d been through today seemed a little more distant.  I picked up the bag of clothing and looked expectantly at Jack.  He got the gist of the look before I could add a question.  

“I only use half the dresser in m-the bedroom.  There should be plenty of space.”  I nodded and he paused again before adding, “Should I just put the kitchen stuff in the kitchen somewhere and we can sort through it later?  I can throw something together for dinner, or breakfast, or whatever meal this is?  You can put the rest anywhere?  We can always move it later?  If we want to.  I mean, we don’t have to.  I mean...I don’t know what I mean.”

His rambling made me stare.  Oh, Jack, did you ever have any self-confidence?  I was too tired to try to address that right now.  At least this quirk of his seemed amusing rather than frustrating.  I might have grinned a little despite myself.  “Alright.”  My usual loquaciousness had been temporarily defeated by annoyance and fatigue.  

He took the box of kitchen stuff and got to work while I arranged the rest.  I quickly realized that the journalist was gone.  I’m still not sure if I was glad he was gone or worried both that he might die now that he left and that he might have done something before he did so.  At least he was gone now.  

His dresser was really much larger than I had originally thought.  The drawers were split in the middle and I quickly realized that Jack had left the right hand side open for me and kept all his clothing on the left.  I had to open a few drawers to do so although I was trying to fight my curiosity and not actively dig through his things.  We were living together now, that didn’t mean I should necessarily rummage through his underwear.  

The top drawer seemed to be jewelry.  I closed it pretty quickly, but from the glimpse I caught, I got the sense that he had to be incredibly wealthy.  Were they all gifts?  If he really was a prostitute, how could he afford that?  

The next drawer held dozens of pairs of pants, shorts, and a swath of dark green and black plaid that had to be a kilt.  Again I felt disoriented by how Scottish he really was, despite his lack of an accent and how American he seemed.  I guess everyone just seemed American to me unless they were very clearly foreign.  Was that some kind of common bias or just the way I was?  

I put my clothes away and continued unpacking.  The framed prints turned out to be the most difficult; Jack already had so much of the walls covered with paintings and the things the previous owner had hung up.  I ended up hanging them all in the bedroom, most placed as aesthetically as I could manage above or below his paintings.  One of them looked oddly like the landscape of one of Jack’s own works, but I dismissed that as coincidence.  Lots of places looked similar and it wasn’t identical.  I put the books on Jack’s many shelves, soon realizing that he actually had plenty of room for those.  Most books seemed to have belonged to the previous owner, and I supposed that made some level of sense, after all, Jack had mentioned that most of the furniture had come with the house and that probably included the bookshelves.  My own collection filled up the rest of the shelves.  I left my laptop by a chair in the living room, not sure where else to stow it, and took my lockbox upstairs.  Having to move that at all had reminded me how vulnerable I actually was, living out of a hotel.  In my apartment, I’d kept it beneath my bed since I’d moved in and never taken it out, in the hotel, I’d hidden it similarly and worried every day that housekeeping would discover it.  I’d have kept it in my car if I’d been able to trust that it wouldn’t be stolen or I wouldn’t get in an accident and have to remove it in the open.  The thing was like a crippled limb: I could no more lose it than enjoy it.  I couldn’t risk putting it in a bank or burying it; the safest place for it was with me and, in a way, the box was sentimental, but it was also the one thing, or rather the one group of things most likely to get me killed or make my life a living hell.  More so even than Jack and his propensity for attracting disaster.  After much deliberation, I decided that my usual hiding place was probably best.  I stooped to slide it under the bed, but it hit something else.  

As much as I didn’t want to invade Jack’s privacy, curiosity got the better of me.  I lifted the blankets and slid the large and heavy cardboard box from beneath the bed.  It looked brand new, probably something he’d bought since he moved in.  Cautiously, I lifted the lid.  

I expected something worse, I’m not sure what, but probably something more like what was in my lockbox, but what I found suited Jack far more perfectly.  Nearly bed-sized itself, the box was absolutely filled to the brim with erotic novels, all paperback, all brand new, and all by the same author.  Jack Valentine.  There was quite a selection, I realized.  Jack was supposedly the most prolific writer in the genre, dubious though that title was.  Jack Valentine.  Not _my_ Jack.  It was a common name.  I guess I should just call the writer Valentine.  Jack had to be a huge fan of Valentine, considering I hadn’t even heard of half the titles I could see.  And they looked untouched.  I suppose he might have lost his collection somehow when he moved in, it scared me more to think that they might have belonged to the previous owner and that Jack had, for some reason, kept them.  I doubted that he would; from what I already knew of him.  He seemed way too horny to _not_ have a stash of porn somewhere.  This made sense.  I found it more odd that he had bothered to hide it.  For one thing, we were not only dating but living together now, even if circumstances surrounding both were a bit strange, for another, he was clearly involved in some kind of sexual work, most likely prostitution, and for a third he’d already made it clear that he pretty much had the libido of a rabbit on viagra.  It wasn’t really surprising to learn that the guy kept this much porn around.  

Although that was a bit intimidating.  I mean, I had dated Garrett, and he wasn’t necessarily the most sexual of my ex-lovers, but Jack might actually be more than I could handle, even if that was something I would find more difficult to admit to than the fact that our massive age difference and backgrounds could cause problems.  

I closed the box and slid it back under the bed, sliding my lockbox under as well, carefully angling it so it probably wouldn’t be dragged out if his box was moved.  

Jack was actually a great cook with more than just cakes, as it turned out.  He’d made dinner, or breakfast, while I unpacked and it was amazing.  We were both too tired to say much while we ate, and we both went upstairs to bed right afterwards.  I fell asleep before I could even wonder what Jack thought of this new arrangement.  Had he even lived with his previous boyfriend?

*      *       *

This was one of the rare occasions that I was so exhausted that sex didn’t even cross my mind.  Even when I was tired, I usually thought of it enough to have a wank before I went to sleep.  Not that that would have been my first choice tonight, but Arcade seemed just as weary, and he probably wasn’t in the mood anyway.  

The change in my surroundings distracted me for a few moments as I lay on my back, before I fell asleep.  The prints on my walls drew my eye.  Taj Mahal, the Great Sphinx, Tokyo at night, Rio de Janeiro, and...and my family’s island.  The castle was in the distance, but it was unmistakable.  I don’t think prints of my family’s island were all that common, were they?  How did Arcade have one?

I resolved to ask him tomorrow as I fell asleep.  

As dreams fade in and out, I suspect that I dreamt through the whole night but only remembered the last segment, a sequence which ultimately woke me up.  

In the dream, I found myself in a dark barn, enclosed in the kind of narrow wooden pen where we held horses for shoeing.  At first I was riding a horse, and then I was one, my bay roan Irish Hunter named Charon.  He was part of the reason I represented myself as a horse; his mane, brown streaked with red and orange and gold matched my hair as perfectly as his personality mirrored mine.  He was even gay, or at least he showed no interest in the mare we kept even when she was in heat and tried to mount our Thoroughbred stallion if they were ever left alone together.  

In the dream I switched between being my horse and riding him, but our emotions were the same.  Thinking back in the morning, I figured the dream was simply representing me in horse form, as I often did in my art.  The wooden pen was constricting.  I felt the thick beams closing in on my legs and sides.  The hay became chains that snaked up and dragged me to the floor.  I fought them.  Cold and smooth as ice water, they weighed me down, pulled me against the worn wood, enveloped me and drove the air from my lungs.  I flailed against them in the dream and to some degree in the real world, kicking at the blankets that had wrapped my legs.  I fought the chains.  Somehow I broke free, at least from the pen.  As a horse, I tore loose like a bullet through flesh, bolting from the barn and racing through a vast green field.  It was Scotland, but at the same time it was not.  This was somehow California as well, and not the wilds, the city.  As a horse I found myself running among a herd.  I recognized people I knew: a grizzled old Azteka, a sleek blue roan arabian mare, a chestnut mustang, an old appaloosa, a white Shetland pony, and a sleek dark brown thoroughbred.  Each came into view in turn as the dream turned my gaze across them.  The herd shifted as I pulled ahead of the group, still dragging the chains that weighed me down.  Beside me now ran two stallions, to my right a nearly white shire far larger than I was, but kind and beautiful and to the left an even more stunning black Vyatka, a pony keeping pace beside me with a tenacity I could never match.  The dream shifted my focus beyond them and I saw a distant Lippizaner racing towards me, his white body covered in scars and bandages until only hints of the pale coat remained.  Charging at me from the left loomed a more formidable sight, an ancient destrier, a monster of a horse, red as Secretariat with a close-cropped mane and golden barding.  

The dream faded out as the crimson stallion bore down on me.  I fell beneath the chains and for a moment I was drowning again as they pulled me through the grass and dirt and into a different vision.  This felt real.  Unable to interact, I watched the image unfold as if I were watching a film.  This was how I had dreamt of the restaurant exploding, but this dream was even more vivid.  I saw a newspaper, focusing on the date.  November third, this year.  That was less than a week away.  It was morning.  Early, judging from the pale sunlight.  I saw a tower, a skyscraper, it bore the words “San Francisco Chronicle.”  The newspaper I didn’t read.  The newspaper Vulpes worked at.  The same newspaper on which I had read the date.  I saw many people going inside, heading to work.  I noticed a familiar figure among them.  Vulpes.  Going to work.  He disappeared inside.  The sunlight shifted hue with hours.  It was probably nearly noon when sudden fire rent the building and the windows exploded outwards.  The vision faded in ash that became dappled sunlight, a roar, and stabbing pain across my chest.  The nightmare burned into my memory as I jolted awake, sprawled across the bed and shivering in a sweat-soaked stupor.  I flinched when a hand touched my shoulder.  

Arcade lay next to me, propped up on one elbow.  He looked groggy.  I’d probably woken him up.  “It’s okay.  It was only a dream.”  He patted my shoulder.  I figure he might have hugged me except my leg was stretched out between us.  My foot hurt a bit, I realized, and his eyes seemed to be watering a little.  I knew from experience that my nightmares sometimes made me sleep violently.  I had scars on my knees and toes because the wall beside my bed had been stone, not plaster.  I’d punched a hole in the wall of my dorm because it wasn’t so sturdy and painful as to passively retaliate against my sleeping frenzies.  

I grimaced.  “Sorry.  I...I kicked you, didn’t I?”  

He winced and nodded.  “Yeah.  Twice.  If...if I might ask, you dreamed you were drowning, didn’t you?”  

I hesitated and nodded.  “Yeah.  More or less.  Sorry, again.”

*      *       *

Note to self, hugging the traumatized prostitute while he was in the throes of nightmare was a bad idea.  I’d been trying to calm him down or at least hold him still so he wouldn’t hurt himself.  He hurt me instead.  He’d already demonstrated that his kicks could apparently kill, although that might have just been the luck of the angle, so I guess I should count my blessings that I just had a badly bruised shin rather than broken bones.  It still hurt like a son of a bitch.  

And now he looked lost in thought, but it wasn’t the hollow look he usually got when bad memories invaded his mind.  I frowned at him.  My throbbing leg kind of made sleep an impossibility for now.  “What is it?”  

Jack hesitated and shook his head.  “Just a...vivid dream.  It spooked me a bit.”  He rolled onto his side, facing me, and vainly attempted to remake the bed.  

“You kicked off most of the blankets while you were trying to swim.”  I did my best to help him.  He still had one arm in a sling, which probably made it painful to haul the blankets back onto the bed, even if he did like pain.  We lay back down when that was done.  Getting out of bed to help with the blankets had also let me see the massive bruise already blossoming along my leg and Jack winced when he noticed it.  

“Sorry, again.” He murmured as we lay back down.  

I ran a hand through my hair, mostly wishing my leg would stop hurting so I could get a decent night’s sleep.  “Let’s just try not to make this a nightly occurrence, alright?”

That throbbing ache had nearly stopped when Jack spoke up suddenly.  

“Where did you get these pictures?”  He gestured at the prints on the wall.  

I was half asleep and that managed to counter my chattiness.  “Ex-boyfriend.  He said my apartment looked like a cell and couldn’t bear to move me back in without decorating.”  I laughed a little and closed my eyes.  Jack, apparently, had lost his desire to sleep.  

“Did he take the pictures?”

I frowned and glanced over at him, keeping my eyes half closed.  “I doubt it.”  Curiosity got the better of me and I added, “Why?”

He stayed silent long enough that I rolled over to look at him.  He studied each of them in turn and then nodded to the one I had presumed was somewhere in the British Isles.  “That one.  That’s my family’s island.”  

I stared at it.  “...Well...you did say it was a tourist attraction, right?”

He thought and then nodded.  “For the eagles.  The wild ones, I mean, not our goldens.  I guess.  Just seemed odd...”  He fell silent and I closed my eyes again, trying to go to sleep.  Apparently, Jack didn’t notice.  

He pointed at the print again and remarked.  “See that building down the hill in the distance?  Right beside that place where the light really pierces the clouds?”  I opened my eyes just in time to see where he was pointing and sighed.  

“Yeah?  What about it?”

“That’s my family’s castle.”

I stayed quiet, somewhat stunned.  I had already realized that his family was massively wealthy, so that wasn’t news, but I’d taken enough close looks at the prints to know what the castle looked like.  It was huge, elegant, and no less imposing than a charging elephant.  The thing had personality and not entirely in good ways.  Seeing it like this I got an impression of Jack’s family that might explain why he acted the way that he did.  Seeing the castle in a print given to me by an ex boyfriend was also a bit jarring.  

Jack frowned suddenly.  He spoke before I could come up with some polite way to end his badly-timed curiosity and go to sleep.  “Wait a second, Agra, India, Giza, Egypt, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, and my family’s island...you said you dated a man named Teagan, right?  Were these from him?”

I groaned a little in annoyance and closed my eyes again.  “Yes and yes.  Jack, I work tomorrow, can we just go to sleep?”

“My uncle, Teagan, worked as a pilot and photographer.  I’m also pretty sure he was gay, considering my mother suddenly severed all ties with him with no explanation what-so-ever and he always kind of gave off that vibe.  He was born on the island we own,” he pointed to that print and did the same as he mentioned the others, “he moved to Giza after college, then he spent a year in Agra before the climate drove him out, he lived in Rio for another year and the same thing happened, he spent a while in Japan and I heard he was thinking of moving to America around the time my mom started pretending he didn’t exist.”

Now my eyes were open and I was studying the prints, slowly processing that realization through all the sleepiness and the pain in my leg.  “Wait a second...”

Jack stared at me.  “You dated my uncle.”  He said that so flatly.  

I stared back at him, stunned and awkward.  “...I dated your uncle...”  Teagan.  Teagan, who sounded Japanese, looked Italian, and whom I had always assumed was American.  I really had to stop doing that.  This was the same Teagan who was slightly older than I was.  And gorgeous.  I guess now I knew where Jack got it from, if his uncle was anything like whichever parent he’d been related to.  Probably his dad.  Okay, this was disturbing, I’d dated two people one generation and at least ten years apart in the same family.  Somehow that was disturbing.  On the other hand, if relationship compatibility was genetic, I’d nearly been a perfect match for Teagan.  Maybe this was a good omen somehow.  

I could see the resemblance now.  Jack’s eyes were violet and Teagan shaved his head, but the high cheekbones, the elegant brows, the subtle, perfectly proportioned nose...  The nose, oddly that was the strongest point of resemblance.  Their noses were absolutely identical.  I couldn’t determine if that was unnerving or wonderful.  Jack blinked at me.  

“What?”

*       *       *

He rolled onto his back, looking away from me and I swear I saw him blush.  “Nothing.  Let’s just get some sleep.”  

I sighed and stared at the canopy over the bed.  Well, this was awkward.  I was sleeping with a man who’d fucked my uncle.  I guess it was a good thing my morals were so lax or I’d really be disgusted by that.  As it was, it was still a bit...creepy, but that was years ago, right?  The past is the past.  I’d been living by that motto for years anyway, I might as well keep doing so.  As long as he didn’t sleep with me and Uncle Tea concurrently, I had no problem with this at all.  

The realization that Arcade had dated my uncle completely blew the nightmare from my thoughts and I fell into a deep and peaceful sleep for the rest of the night.  I woke a few hours later, completely alert and wired.  Most mornings I felt half-dead until I had my first cup of tea, but there had always been rare occasions when I found myself inexplicably energized as soon as I awoke.  Wait.  This wasn’t inexplicable.  Something was happening today, right?  Yes.  Something was definitely happening today.  What was it?  It wasn’t a dream.  Arcade had already moved in, so it wasn’t that...

My eyes snapped wide as it dawned on me.  The party.  The Halloween party that Vulpes had invited me too.  Assuming he showed up and hadn’t died.  I really hoped he hadn’t died.  The idea hit me harder than I’d expected; just thinking of it felt like another knife in my gut and I don’t think I could handle if it really happened.  

And there was that dream I’d had, that horribly vivid dream.  I felt my hands start to shake and fought back the recollection.  I didn’t want to believe that my dreams had some kind of significance.  That was just stupid.  But I had dreamt repeatedly of drowning before I had fallen in the Thames, I had found myself envisioning hospitals and pill bottles before the overdose I’d witnessed, and I had been plagued with nightmares about cars crashing into the sea before the accident that had killed my father.  I’d gotten to like it a little, I guess.  It was like a challenge; spitting in the face of fate to prove logic right.  I had refused to see how often it failed, but now...maybe that kid was right.  My first instinct was not to ignore the dream and watch in unbiased curiosity to see what happened simply because I couldn’t risk the alternative.  If the skyscraper exploded as I had foreseen, Vulpes would surely die, and I could not let that happen.  I had to tell him.  I had no idea what the hell I would say, what the hell I could say, to convince him, but I had to try.  Even if it turned out to be a silly, stupid, irrational fear like so many others...I couldn’t chance it.  I couldn’t lose anyone else right now, it was too soon.  I’d warn him tonight.

I rolled over to check the only clock in the room, turning to face Arcade in the process and realizing that he was still there, still asleep beside me.  That warmed my heart.  I had a wonderful, kind, annoyingly moral man in my bed and I’d hopefully be waking up to him for many days to come.  That was practically the happiest thought that had ever occurred to me.  

And barring death, I’d be meeting another, even sexier man for a very American Halloween party at seven.  It was two in the afternoon.  My brain processed this concept more slowly than it should have.  A Halloween party.  At seven.  A costume party.  At seven.  I had no costume yet.  I had nothing to wear.  I had five hours to find a costume and get ready despite the fact that I knew practically nothing about the holiday, the customs, and according to my mother I dressed as if my wardrobe consisted entirely of used clothing for broadway extras.  I needed help.  I needed help fast.  

Out of bed, into stained jeans and a Metallica t-shirt, grab and clean a raw potato and rush down the street eating it like an apple.  I ignored the few stares I was getting.  They were staring because of what I was eating, not because I was gay, so that didn’t bother me.  It hadn’t taken long to run through the list of who I knew around here.  Back home, I would have called my sister; for a ten year old, she dressed like a fashion designer and I trusted her judgement.  But she wasn’t helpful half a world away.  I doubted Lily or Raul would be good choices and Garret, Gibson, and Daisy would just make things awkward, all for different reasons.  Cass seemed to hate me, which left one option and I prayed to god that she had decent taste.  

I found Veronica outside a cafe near the garage, eating a sandwich.  It must be her day off, because rather than wearing her mechanic’s uniform, today she wore a red dress so stunning that I hardly recognized her.  She’d replaced her brown knit cap with a wide-brimmed pink sun hat and a pair of sunglasses.  I had to study her for a moment to be sure this was the right woman.  “Vero?”

That smile answered my question.  “What’s up?  You okay?  You fell off the face of the Earth for a while and we were all kinda worried.”

“Sorry, things got kinda crazy, but good crazy.  Vero, are you any good with fashion stuff?”  Please, please, please, please...

Her smile gradually widened and she cracked her knuckles.  “Step into my office...”

Pressed for time, knowing nothing of fashion or local stores, and somewhat forced to trust her judgement, I followed Veronica’s practically giddy pace through the streets to a little general store which seemed from outside to be a tourist shop for misinformed visitors to Chinatown.  The outer windows displayed a massive array of Godzilla merchandise in all sizes as well as several different toy space-ships and a few other items practically buried by the rest.  Inside, the store was dimly lit and hung with halloween decorations and Chinese lanterns.  A small balding man perched on a stool behind a desk covered in toy effigies of Tokyo’s famous movie monster.  

Veronica waved at the man and got a smile in return.  “Hey, Cliff, you sell Halloween costumes, right?  You stocked some from that website I showed you?”

He nodded.  “Yup, they’re in the back, by the food stuffs.”  He leaned over the counter as Veronica dragged me towards the back of the shop and added, “And feel free to buy something else too...like a Godzilla...please?  Please...?”  I caught a glimpse of him gesturing forlornly at the array of plastic reptiles surrounding his desk.  They seemed vaguely reminiscent of a tiny army, like Gulliver’s Travels gone mad.  

The back of the shop consisted of one small shelving unit loaded with organic and imported foods and candies and a full wall loaded with the most varied assortment of costumes I had ever seen.  The store didn’t seem to get much business, but apparently some of the costumes had gotten moved around because a short and angry man with a hat that was almost a fedora knelt at one end of the shelves putting the costumes back in the right places.  He kept a running commentary under his breath and my hearing just barely managed to catch enough to recognize that he was speaking in latin, mostly cursing.  He caught me looking at him and met my gaze with the kind of lethal intensity I expected from Vulpes.  He paused his muttering for a split second and then resumed, going back to what he’d been doing and apparently ignoring me.  Before I could look away from the strange and creepy store worker and take a closer look at the wall of costumes, Veronica had a tape measure in hand and she went for me.  

“You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do this.  My family just don’t appreciate fashion, you know?  And Raul and Cass, well, their idea of fashion is anything they can find that doesn’t have stains on it.  Now I’m thinking something dark, kinda creepy, but also pretty cool.  You wouldn’t go for cute, would you?  What kind of party is this?  Now if only you were a leggy brunette, I’d _love_ to see you in that sexy, adorable cat costume, but that’s just wishful thinking...”

I raised an eyebrow, considering my long brown hair and wiry legs.  Veronica waved dismissively and clarified.  “No, I mean if you weren’t a _guy._   Now what did you say about this party?”  She buzzed about me, measuring wildly and adjusting my arms and legs to get a more accurate estimate of my size and proportions.  I guess I was accustomed enough to the man-handling, but her barrage of questions baffled me.  “Um...well, it’s a Halloween party...”

“You said that.”

“And it sounds like it’s fairly classy.  It might be a cocktail party, but it’s also an office party.”

She frowned.  “Wait, did you already get a job?  What do you do anyway?  I mean, cause that kinda sets the style.  Besides, then you could do something like dress as Charles Darwin if you work at a zoo.  Or King Kong.  Either way.”  

Oh, the dreaded question.  “It’s not _my_ job; I got invited.  As...as a date, I guess.”  I hope, I added to myself.  Yes I had Arcade.  I also had Vulpes.  Hey, they were both good things, just not necessarily _together_.  Besides, I couldn’t exactly break up with Vulpes and be sure he wouldn’t kill me for that and I’d probably piss off Arcade sooner or later, so I might as well have a back-up who probably wouldn’t care.  Hopefully.  Vulpes didn’t seem to think this was a particularly exclusive relationship.  Then again, maybe he did and he was just going to kill me for it when I least expected that.  Oh, I was treading thin ice again, as usual.  This was almost fun, in a sadistic, potentially fatal kind of way.  I was setting myself up to get heartbroken and murdered, wasn’t I?  Damn.  Not again.  

“Oooh...” Veronica murmured and then frowned.  “So you’re going out with that doctor, then?”  

Damn.  She did know about me and Arcade, didn’t she?  Shit.  I shook my head awkwardly.  

That frown persisted.  “So...things didn’t work out between you and him?”  She hovered between curious and sympathetic.  

I shook my head again.  “Things are...okay with him...just...this was a different guy.  A news reporter.”

Veronica narrowed her eyes a little.  “...Okay.  Well, it’ll probably be a more trendy party then, so a geeky costume is probably a bad idea.  ...I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt on this one and figure it’s none of my business, but you’d better not screw around on that doctor with the ancient car.  He seemed like a sweet guy, I mean, I don’t know him very well, but...well you’d be kind of an asshole for that...”

Don’t rub it in.  You don’t even know the full story.  I did my best to look innocent, but probably came off more awkward, especially as she started messing with my hair, seeing how it would look in various styles.  “Trust me, I know.”

Vero let it go, thank god, and spent another ten full minutes considering my face.  At length, she snagged half a dozen costumes off the wall and held them up.  

Growing up with five aunts, seven female cousins, a gay uncle, a young sister, and my mother I can gladly say that I have never been put through so thorough a shopping experience as I was that day.  After nearly four hours, I had been in and out of over fifteen costumes with different hair styles and theorized face paint for each.  About halfway though, I think the guy organizing the shelves realized how much I was starting to regret my decision of asking Veronica to help.  I’d noticed early on that he kept watching me out of the corner of his eye and soon he was outright staring, a strained look on his face somewhere between schadenfreude and pity.  Near the end, I think Veronica finally picked up on that as well, because the costume she approved she sited as, “the simplest.”  I suppose it was.  After the quickly dismissed “Doppler Effect” idea and the close runner up of “sexy demon”, “sexy vampire” was a relief.  Aside from the fangs, cape, and face-paint, I already had everything I’d need, but I bought the whole thing anyway.  It was probably better to make sure the colors matched.  I thanked Veronica, trying to seem genuinely grateful rather than glad to be done with it all, and left.  I had about an hour before he’d hopefully pick me up for this party and I’d probably need the time to get ready.  


	16. Just a Flesh Wound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, it got much longer than I had expected and honestly, I've never been to this kind of party, so I had some trouble writing those parts. Also, I've gotten really into Dragon Age Inquisition and between that and college I got pretty busy with other things. On the upside, I should have a great deal more time to write in a week or so and I'll hopefully get back to updating this more regularly as well as possibly starting/posting a DAI fan fic as well.

——————CHAPTER 16 (Just a Flesh Wound)——————  
By the time I got back home, Arcade had already left for work. He’d written a note stating as much and set it on my laptop. I fed Rex and got ready. My frame wasn’t completely typical but the costume fit well enough. I liked the shade of the long black pants, but the cut annoyingly hid the best qualities of my legs and the red vest concealed the muscles the frilly white shirt showed off. The black cloak and accompanying high collar, on the other hand, were something I could really appreciate, but I always had liked that kind of dramatic style. I added a pewter dragon pin to one side of the vest and traded out the relatively cheap belt that had come with the costume for my own favorite black leather belt. My belt was a little longer and slightly worn, but the metal bits and small studs along the length were sculpted silver with rubies. The buckle formed a pair of eagles locking talons over the middle, wings spread. They were sea eagles, the kind that link their talons while flying during courtship or sometimes aggressively and fall together before breaking apart somewhere near the ground. I’d heard stories that sometimes they held on too long and crashed, but I wasn’t sure if that was true or not. It seemed somehow fitting, given the dangerous position I’d gotten myself in right now.   
Checking a mirror, I grinned a little. Scotland, or at least my family, had an unfortunate lack of costumed holidays; I could really get used to dressing up as a vampire from time to time, and the look was a good one for me, even if it didn’t really show off the better parts of my body. But I was only halfway done. This was the first costume party I’d gone to in years, and I was going to go all out.   
In the next twenty minutes, I managed to persuade my hair to take on some vague semblance of an old fashioned style. Tied back in my usual black ribbon the pile of auburn waves framed my face and trailed down the back of the cloak. I’d experimented with make-up enough that I looked notably pale (which was only a shade or so more pale than normal, but at least it hid the scar on my jaw) and that made my already vibrant eyes stand out even more. I’d considered trying to find contact lenses last minute to turn them red, but violet would have to do and the effect was still jarring. People would probably think I had red lenses over blue eyes; violet meant I was partly an albino anyway, so I counted it as close enough. The costume came with fake fangs and I popped them in. Having never really dealt with anything like that before, the plastic inserts made my mouth feel awkward and I had to fight the urge to keep running my tongue over them. Now I knew why horses hated their bits. I managed to close my mouth and checked my appearance. I looked like a cheap knock-off version of Lestat. Gay, unemployed, Lestat. Or maybe that was normal Lestat. I couldn’t remember his sexuality off-hand and I supposed I might have more of a job than he did for most of the series, that was a bad metaphor.   
The doorbell rang a few minutes later, much to Rex’s deep concern. Hushing the dog, I rushed to answer it.   
A somewhat short canine in partial football gear stood on my porch. Or at least that was my first impression of the costume. It seemed to be American football padding, shoulder pads and such, with the additions of black ski goggles and what seemed to be a taxidermy dog-head hood. Between the hood and the goggles, I couldn’t be sure this was Vulpes and, reluctant to rely solely on height and context, I tilted my head and stared, trying to spot any evidence of bandages where he’d been shot.   
Real eyes hidden, glass dog eyes glaring at me, Vulpes was apparently amused. “Does this really make me so unrecognizable?”  
I gulped, only now realizing how intimidating the combination of hidden eyes and glaring dog hood actually made him. “Yeah, it really does. But only until you talk.”  
As usual, his emotions were a mystery— even more-so now than normally. “Does my voice amuse you?” He sounded guarded, I think. He nodded down the hill and started towards the stairs, clearly expecting me to follow. I was surprised to know he was injured; he moved as if invincible.   
I closed the door and followed, a bit rattled by his tone. “No, I just mean it’s distinct. It’s kinda scary, actually, especially with the hood and goggles. Is that a real dog head?”   
He paused, turning that enigmatic stare on me again, and as usual I half expected him to kill me. “It is.” He paused and added, “Do you consider me to be `scary,’ as you put it?”   
He continued down the steps and I followed. Between my constant fear that my lack of dexterity and huge feet would send me careening down the narrow steps and my even greater trepidation that I’d ultimately say the wrong thing and face a torturous death at the hands of my volatile paramour, those ten minutes held more adrenaline than any horror game I’d ever played. My voice caught in my throat as I carefully chose my next words.   
“Honestly...yes. You terrify me, but at the same time I find you... tantalizing.” He paused beside a nondescript black sports car and looked back at me, giving that subtle little smile he had.   
“Are you coming?”  
Oh. I hadn’t realized he’d been waiting for me. I had for once remembered that the cars were different here and where he was standing, I had expected him to move to the driver’s side as I wouldn’t have been able to get in until he did so. As I approached, he opened the passenger’s side door for me and I automatically took the hint. Sitting in the black leather seat of the sports car, I realized how odd the gesture had been. He opened car doors for me? What was he, a throwback to victorian London or the twenties or something? Who even did that any more? Besides, he’d only gotten shot two days ago, I mean, I had a broken arm, but he’d been shot, surely that took some priority? Could he even drive safely? When he got in beside me, I retracted that last statement. This was Vulpes fucking Inculta. He could drive. He could apparently shrug off pain and serious injury more readily than Monty Python’s Black Knight; the man was incredible.   
He looked over at me. “Am I that distracting?”   
I nodded before I realized that he meant I hadn’t actually fastened my seatbelt and the car had started to complain. “Oh, right, sorry.” I swear I heard him stifle a laugh as he looked away and started to drive.   
Driving took my mind off my lack of confidence. The city was busy at this hour; there were trucks and busses everywhere around here. I stared out the window, feeling my muscles tense at every car that turned towards us.   
* * *  
I suppose I had misjudged Jack slightly. The issue was minor and unlikely to effect anything but it still irked me. I misjudged no one. I made no mistakes; I couldn’t afford to in my line of work. Mistakes were usually lethal. Thus far, the mistakes I had made around Jack had caused no problems, but that did not mean that they never would. I had to figure out just what it was about this barely significant and somehow fascinating man from my past that managed to throw me off. Or maybe I just wasn’t thinking straight right now for other reasons. I was still injured and pain made it more difficult to reason, but I was used to pain, I’d gotten used to it long ago. It shouldn’t bother me.   
I glanced over at Jack again. This time I was right, or at least most likely correct: he was afraid, haunted by the crash that had killed his father, no doubt. I had found the article among many other things in my research on him. It had been a bus. His amethyst eyes flicked across every large vehicle in sight and I heard the breath catch in his lungs each time we passed close to one. His entire body clung to the seat, knuckles pale against his knees, his jaw locked in place so his teeth wouldn’t chatter; the man was transparent.   
And yet I had expected him to wear a far more revealing costume. It was Halloween, or one day shy, anyway; a man with his body, in his line of work...the prediction had made perfect sense. He had openly dated another man in London, he openly seemed to date the mysterious doctor, and even his relationship with me seemed uncomfortably less than clandestine, was it at all possible that the man still managed to be shy about his sexuality?   
I had doubted it, but now, in the conservatively flattering costume, I reconsidered. Or perhaps he simply did not know how open I wanted to be. If that was the case, I appreciated the effort; this relationship was hardly something I wanted the Legion to find out about, at least not the full extent of it. That was part of why I had chosen to invite him tonight. Inviting him solved two known problems at once and no one would ever believe that I would so dramatically suggest a sexual relationship if it was the sort that I should wish to keep secret; by inviting Jack, I would lead Caesar (and anyone else in the Legion) to believe that there could never possibly be anything between me and the eccentric novelist. I had never concealed my annoyance at the frequent advances made by the profligate women I worked with, when I wished to emphasize my dislike of profligates and loyalty to the Legion, that was most often what I chose to point out. I could never, of course, outright punish these women for their persistence, nor could I even rebuke them more fiercely than I already had, such simply would not fit with the cover persona I maintained at the office. And thus I had come up with my solution to this irritation and the reason I would give the Legion for inviting Jack. Half the reason, of course. He could still be useful. The Legion would desire his loyalty as well; silencing the women who kept bothering me was just a bonus. I would ensure that they gave up on me with a lie that was really not a lie. Or not entirely.   
* * *  
“I heard that you had quite the adventure selecting a costume.”  
His voice didn’t simply break the silence, it smashed it apart and burned the pieces. Not to say that he spoke loudly; he had the car radio off and his voice actually hovered somewhere around a loud whisper. That was how loud Vulpes usually spoke, but as tense as I was at the time, his statement drove me to flinch and emit a stifled yelp that became something more like a whimper. Stopping at a conveniently timed red light, he turned to stare at me. I didn’t need to see his eyes to know he raised an eyebrow.   
I sighed. “Sorry. Cars...cars kinda freak me out.”  
“I know.” he replied calmly.  
Now I stared. Okay, sexy stalker, how does that not make you any more terrifying? Oh, right, that isn’t possible. It was a really good thing he was equally sexy... “...how do you know that? How do you know that I had trouble picking out a costume either, for that matter?”  
He chuckled. His laugh was so quiet. It wasn’t quite fake, but it was...calculated, like everything else about him. I wondered what he would sound like if he just laughed normally. “You aren’t exactly difficult to learn about, Jack. Although in the case of the costume you simply happened to patronize the shop where a friend of mine works.”  
My initial response was “you have friends?” but luckily I had enough tact to head that one off. “O-Oh. Um...was that the small angry man or the cashier?”  
He glanced over at me, terrifying me for a whole lot of reasons not the least of them being that he was still driving. “The `small angry man’?” He stifled a more legitimate laugh. “I have never expected to hear Cato Hostilius described thusly, but I suppose that is accurate. I am not sure that I have ever seen the man calm and I’ve seen him unconscious.”   
* * *  
Why had I said that? Couldn’t I have just stopped at the previous sentence? What was it about Jack that kept making me slip up like this?  
* * *  
...wait a second, why had he seen his friend unconscious? Did I even want to know? Was that normal? That wasn’t normal. That couldn’t be. ...Although I had seen an awful lot of people I knew unconscious or asleep, which was, I guess, the same basic thing, right? Maybe that wasn’t so weird after all.   
We pulled into a parking garage near the newspaper building right after that, so I didn’t have much time to consider what he’d said. I got out as soon as he parked, but at least I did my best to look like I wasn’t scrambling for solid ground. He’d been a pretty good driver, I think. Most people I knew seemed to be good drivers or maybe they were just careful because they all knew that barely handled car rides as it was and could only partly control myself if the driver seemed mostly competent. I think the worst driver I’d ever been driven by— short of my father— had been Lily, but I’d been basically stoned whenever she drove me anywhere, so I couldn’t really be sure.   
Vulpes didn’t seem to notice my careful exit; he had his phone out to check something. Putting it back in the pocket I hadn’t realized he’d had, he explained, “I have someone I need to speak to. I’ll let you into the building and accompany you to the correct floor and then you will either wait there until I return or follow my co-workers to the party.”  
It was an order, not a suggestion. I nodded, surprised by how natural the power dynamic felt. I guess my mother really had me trained. “I’ll wait there.” The idea of the party terrified me now that we were here. As much as I was technically out of the closet, I’d never really dated openly. People seemed to think that Arcade was my father and the age difference helped dissuade assumptions enough that I could be more comfortable, but Vulpes was my age— at least he seemed to be, I wasn’t entirely sure. This was different. They would know we were a couple, and if I went ahead of him to the party, people would inevitably ask who I was with, right? Oh, god, I wasn’t sure I could do this.   
He had started towards the stairs out of the garage, but now he paused and looked back. Again, I didn’t need to see his eyes to get the gist of his expression. Or maybe I did. I had expected him to be annoyed, surely reading the cause of my trepidation as clearly as if I’d written it on my forehead, or maybe more clearly given my handwriting, but his tone was oddly gentle. Firm, but still much closer to kindness than I expected from him. “Follow me. I invited you, did I not? What are you afraid of?”  
I hesitated, feeling a blush creep into my face. “...sorry. I...”  
“You are not used to this. Somehow. Surprisingly. Again, what are you afraid of? Do you think they will judge you? Does it matter? You will never see these people again, in all likelihood. What they think is immaterial. That said, I do need to deal with them after today, so please bear that in mind. Remember also that they will all surely become intoxicated to the point that most will likely remember very little of tonight. You have nothing to fear.” I got the sense that the last statement was as much a consolation as a warning. He was pointing out what he’d already said as well as suggesting that not only should I fear him more than them, but also implying that I alone had nothing to fear because they should be afraid of him. I didn’t really expect any part of that to be a bluff; I always felt like the man could go out for a date and leave a massacre. That was just part of the fun with him.  
* * *  
As I had expected, many of my coworkers were on their way to the party already. Most of them were female and I knew that most were single, as such I was unsurprised to see that hardly any of them had brought companions. In the large elevator of the tower, I found Jack and myself accompanied by my boss, his wife, and seven unaccompanied female coworkers. Or at least I presumed that they were unaccompanied. The two who had not made advances towards me could well be lesbians dating each other.   
Jack shadowed me into the elevator like the cautious secret that my relationship to him sort of was. Being in such close proximity to the man, I found myself keenly aware of his height. I was never _ignorant_ of how tall most men were compared to me— particularly when I had to be near Lanius— but with Jack so close beside me and the strong implication that we were a couple, such a drastic height difference seemed somehow telling. In his vampire costume, it was equally obvious that Jack was not simply a coworker attending alone, but rather a guest, easily presumed to be my companion for the evening. That said, dressed as I was, I must have been barely recognizable.   
In the elevator around us, my boss and his wife stood dressed as George Washington and his wife. Though they had likely chosen partly due to their own status as middle-aged, relatively ugly people, the choice seemed almost comically opposed to the attire of the rest of the elevator’s occupants— aside from Jack and myself. All women, and all decently young and attractive, they wore skimpy costumes ranging from sexy nun and sexy devil to sexy witch and something I had to presume was supposed to represent a black cat, although all it had in common with the feline were color, ears, and a tail. _I_ looked more canine than that costume made her look feline. Yes, I was wearing a dog head, but that wasn’t really very much.  
With so much of my face covered, all of my coworkers stared, certain that they hadn’t seen Jack before but unable to recognize me. I saw several of the women delay their investigation of my identity to carefully take in the curves and angles of Jack’s body. My boss, clearly heterosexual, ignored Jack almost completely, frowned at me, and asked bluntly, “Todd?”  
I looked up at him. “Thomas?” I didn’t like the man, though I hid it well. I would have called him sir had I actually respected him at all.   
“...oh.” I heard his surprise and stared, carefully judging his emotions. The reason for his shock seemed obvious: it was Jack. Although I had never shown any interest in the women around me, my coworkers had always seemed to assume that I must be dating some woman, likely some famous woman, if they had any intelligence, because that was the most likely reason for me to conceal such a romance from a hoard of nosy journalists. I had never truly decided the sexuality of my cover persona and as for my own, it hardly mattered to me, but I suppose that something unintentional had led my coworkers to assume that I was attracted to women.   
Actually, I suspected that the main reason was my frequent dealings with Martina Groesbeck. The woman was a spy who believed that she was aiding the police by reporting to me. How very wrong she was. She had valuable information and reported to a friend of mine almost as often, but she surely was the only woman who typically entered my office and given the length of some of our chats and her own relative attractiveness, I supposed that it should not be surprising to learn that my coworkers had come to imagine something between me and her. Although surely I had more frequent, longer discussions with men in private. I suppose it must be somehow telling the way that profligates assumed romance from such meetings only if the participants were of opposing genders.   
Of course, now that they believed that I was gay, everyone in the elevator was much too polite to say anything directly. They were also much too awkward to find an alternative conversation topic for twelve whole floors. I didn’t care. They didn’t seem to realize this.   
* * *  
I watched the brief exchange, grasping the meaning quite easily. I’d had plenty of similar conversations myself, and they’d usually ended with more awkwardness or even outright hostility. This was good, all things considered. I still stood lock-kneed and statuesque beside him, willing myself to fade into the mirrored steel walls. Vulpes seemed utterly unshakable, a bastion of logic completely impervious to pressure of any kind. The man had balls of steel, I had to give him that.   
He remained completely silent, clearly seeing no need for further explanation. As much as I often felt that Vulpes would always remain an enigma to me, I knew him well enough to sense him daring his coworkers to rebuke his relationship to me. If he’d shied away or tried to deny it, I don’t think I’d have had the courage to stay; but this was Vulpes Inculta. I hadn’t expected him to do that. I’d expected hostility, or maybe a stoic defense of his decisions, but again, the man was nothing if not brazen. Even without any visible expression, I knew that he was daring them to make something of it, and that gave me courage to be something other than aspiring wallpaper. I would have to thank him for that later.   
Around the fourteenth floor, the man dressed as Washington held out a hand to me. “Tom Clipper. Nice to meet you.”   
I shook it, almost forgetting to answer in my frantic endeavor to calculate the exact way in which I should shake his hand, and conduct myself, and smile politely. God, I hated this. I had no idea how to act. I felt like a stag in the middle of a four-lane motorway; all eyes were on me and I had no fucking clue what to do.   
As a result, my voice reverted and my accent came roaring back. Tom frowned. I could tell he wanted to be polite but truly had no idea what I’d said, so I repeated, actively fighting my old nationality, “Jack MacLean. Nice to meet you.” Losing the accent wasn’t hard. It had never been intentional; just a side effect of my travels. I took on the accent of whatever country I was in, provided they spoke English. Besides, I watched enough American media that I just kind of picked it up.   
“You’re Scottish?” It was one of the women who asked.   
I nodded, feeling like I shouldn’t give my default answer of “Aye.” An awkward silence descended again with no one knowing exactly what to say next.   
Another dozen floors went by until another woman spoke with a grin. “I can see why you two get along.”   
* * *  
Arriving at the building’s top floor, I found myself greeted by the man who had texted me.   
Alerio stood in the hallway, dressed in such a basic suit that he seemed costumed. I had trained him well, so he kept his expression almost completely neutral. But his facade was not perfect and I could read him too well to miss the tension in his posture, the hint of fear, and the split second of visible shock as he saw that I simply wore my Legion uniform instead of a costume. True, wearing my uniform was a bold move, perhaps alarmingly so to someone as cautious as Alerio, but there had been fear in his eyes even before he had caught sight of me, and it was exceedingly strange for him to risk my cover to meet me here. He had news, and not good news.   
I frequently met with various people for both my jobs, so it was unlikely that any of my coworkers would become suspicious if I pretended that Alerio was a contact for an article that I was working on- they probably wouldn’t even ask, especially because I often wrote about very serious things, by their judgement, mostly what profligates considered crime. Some of it was crime. Some was simply Legion activities. Reporting served both my interests, effectively doubling the terrorist influence of the Legion’s more violent actions, especially the way I spun the stories.   
My coworkers all presumed that Alerio was here with one of the three secretaries chatting beside him, no doubt as they waited for someone else to arrive, but that presumption changed as he stepped forward to speak to me.   
“I have critical information for you.” He barely stopped himself from addressing me more formally. He worked for me, of course, he had for most of his life, but that wasn’t the sort of thing either of us wanted known outside the Legion. Here, he was simply a source, the sort of informant typical to reporters, or so we must both lead my coworkers to believe.   
* * *  
I immediately picked up on the tension in this stranger talking to Vulpes. I recognized that he was also dangerous, though clearly not to the same level as my exceptionally volatile paramour. My first thought was that this visibly uncomfortable man was disturbed solely by my implied relationship to Vulpes, whom I assumed was his coworker. I didn’t even consider that this could be some associate of his from the organization he’d mentioned.   
Vulpes glanced at me. “Follow them down the hall to the party or wait here.” His tone was far gentler than I had expected, he sounded almost jovial. Of course he did, I realized, he was using an alias. Todd Acerbi had never existed, but the man his coworkers knew by that name was quiet, possibly shy, and almost surely a nice person. Vulpes Inculta was the reality behind that guise. While we were here, he would have to act like Todd, but that would only last as long as the party. On one hand, this was highly disorienting, on the other the idea of being here at a party with a man who would have to act nice seemed somehow enchanting. I wasn’t the sort of man to think of myself as Cinderella, even for an instant, but the idea of an evening where Vulpes would be acting in almost complete opposition to his nature seemed oddly fairytale. And hell, if Vulpes ever showed compassion and he wasn’t just pretending, magic had to be involved.   
But he’d also be leaving me alone to wait for him. I thought back over my exceedingly limited experience with parties. In college, I’d mostly shadowed my friends at parties, often slinking away with Ven once that got started and never spending much time at them. At the high-class soirees my family put on, I had always trailed my mother in a similar fashion, to the point that those who didn’t see the resemblance usually assumed I was her bodyguard. Even as a young boy, I had clung to her, and with little time spent apart, and no siblings for much of my life, I had never learned how to really interact when alone. I hesitated. Then nodded. Then stood awkwardly against the wall. I was still uncomfortably taller than everyone else here and it made me feel even more like a freak. I tried to look like I was comfortable.   
* * *  
Jack looked hilariously uncomfortable. I nearly laughed aloud seeing him stand against the wall like some kind of soldier. The man was not military in the least, but his stature, musculature, and rigid stance probably deceived most of my coworkers. I smiled briefly at him, letting a genuine smile past my facade. “I’ll be back shortly.” Hopefully I wouldn’t miss much of Jack’s amusing reactions. There was no way I could truly care for him, he was just a source of amusement. A source of amusement who managed to distract me far too often. Forcing my expression back to a neutral mask, I guided Alerio wordlessly to my office. Neither of us bothered to turn on the lights. We avoided electricity for the most part in the Legion and both of us could see well enough in the dark.   
My boss tried not to make it too obvious, but between my writing skill, resources, and the information I had access to, I was clearly the lead journalist of the paper, and as such my office was no cubicle. I had a corner office, enclosed by glass on two sides and one of the largest on the floor. Disliking lavish furnishings, my desk was plain black wood, but massive. The shelving matched. The walls bore the obligatory display of awards and such, just what little I needed to make my cover seem normal. The shelves held a small library, mostly the resources I used for my writing, but also what few books I’d picked up for other purposes. They were all the books I owned; I kept very little at my Legion residence. My laptop held most of my work, all password protected and mostly encrypted, of course. I kept what little paperwork I needed in the huge desk’s many drawers, along with a small selection of identical black pens and pencils. A few fake plants and a selection of art and photos made my office seem less empty and gave my cover persona some further believability. My desk added to the creation of Todd Acerbi as a genuine human being. That was entirely a perk of my true intention. I kept much of my life secret from the Legion, even many things they would not have minded. My office was where I spent most of my time, where I worked both jobs, and where I met with contacts I trusted, at least to some degree. Anyone I let in here would see the wide assortment of seemingly unrelated objects arrayed like an armada.   
They were trophies.   
Or perhaps memento was a better term. The items looked insignificant. Few made any clear reference to their importance. No casual observer could guess that the glass sphinx on my desk was a token I had kept to remind myself of a particularly tricky assassination. No coworker could recognize the pencil sharpener as a souvenir of the bombing I’d engineered on an Australian freighter. No stranger would notice the barely-visible bloodstains on the fist-sized ruby on my desk, and few if any would believe that it was not merely red glass. The ruby was by far the most valuable of the collection. Only three of the objects had been acquired before I had joined the Legion, and I had always made sure that those three could never be picked out as such. That was why my choices sometimes seemed odd, such as the toy car that served to remind me of a village I had helped to destroy in northern Africa. My memory was nearly perfect; I would not forget any of the ventures, but the items served as pleasant reminders, subtle trophies of my favorite accomplishments. They were just things, and I had never been a sentimental man, but I counted the objects arrayed on my desk among my most prized possessions. In the whole, I could think of no significant event in my entire life that was not in some way represented by one of the trinkets. And just yesterday a new prize had joined their ranks, not on my desk but behind it, looming above my small, plain office chair and eyeing all who met with me here with a perfect mirror of my own standard expression. Jack’s painting had perfectly captured the essence of who I was, which seemed accidental given his apparent inability to judge my character accurately. Or perhaps I was simply reading too much into the exquisitely-painted fox’s cunning stare.   
Alerio cast a curious glance over the painting before meeting my gaze. “We found Septimus and discovered who he is working for. It is not good news. We tracked Septimus to the docks, he met with an agent of Lanius.” He paused, waiting for a response, if I felt like adding one. I didn’t. “As of yet, we have been unable to determine what Lanius will do with any information Septimus may have relayed, nor have we managed to capture Septimus. He has yet to stray far from Lanius; our sources report that he is badly injured.”   
I let my lips curl in a subtle smile at that statement. “Capture Septimus. He will leave sooner or later and when he does, we shall have him. Is there anything else?”  
Alerio gave me a strange look. Having never seen any semblance of this expression on his face before, it took me a few seconds to place concern. I had been leaning slightly on my desk but straightened self-consciously. Perhaps I had been stooped a bit too visibly, revealing either my pain or the slight bulge of bandages on my abdomen. The blonde doctor had done good work. I had not risked revealing the wound, but I knew some basic medicine myself. I had expected to die once I had noticed the wound. I despised owing my life to that man, but such debt was still preferable to death.   
The lesser frumentari met my gaze and looked away, seeing the sudden cold of my stare. “Caesar has deemed bear baiting too dangerous with the risk of revealing our locations to the profligates. The bears are to be released within the next few days. Lanius will manage this.”  
I considered the news. Lanius would seek, as he often did, to antagonize me though his completion of this task. He endeavored to inconvenience me whenever possible and I expected this; I did the same. Managing to release a bear in any place that would inconvenience me seemed nigh impossible, besides, he almost certainly did not know that I was injured, and I suspected that I could fight a bear one-on-one were I well. However, if Septimus had informed Lanius of my relationship with Jack...  
Alerio remained silent, expecting a response for a few seconds before he nodded politely and murmured a farewell. I replied softly and waited for him to leave. I don’t believe Alerio expected me to follow and he shouldn’t have. I would not check my wound until I was alone. The pain seemed to have increased slightly. The doctor had given me profligate medicines, which had annoyed me, but they had worn off long ago, letting me better judge the state of the injury. It had felt strange for the past hour or so. I did not believe that it had torn open, nor did I expect any serious changes, but I preferred to check, just to be sure. Besides, the bandages were due for a change anyway. This was another instance where I chose to ignore Legion restrictions on medicine.   
The wound was mending, albeit slowly, but it had not reopened. The sensation I had noticed was simply a section of scab that had cracked and let it bleed again, but the stitches were intact. I changed the bandages and made sure that they would be nearly invisible beneath my clothing. Jack knew I was injured. He alone could be trusted with that knowledge.   
It was odd, I suppose, that I trusted Jack as much as I did, if trust was even the word for my prediction that he simply had no reason to work against me. I felt that I understood him completely, at least at that time, and saw no reason to keep such obvious truths hidden from him. In fact, for the most part, I felt that I could drop much of my usual facade while in his company. That was an exceedingly rare allowance; I normally only dropped my guard when alone, or on very rare occasions when I was around a target who was both helpless and doomed. Still, my cold venire was a habit now, one I had yet to completely dismiss. I did not anticipate being wholly open with Jack at any point in the near future, but I felt little need to maintain a truly impenetrable guise while around him.   
I found Jack exactly where I had left him. He stood against the wall by the water cooler near the elevator, limbs rigidly at his sides, clearly trying to avoid both notice and eye-contact. His gaze flicked between the light fixtures, the hideous carpet, and the bubbles in the tank of the cooler beside him. Moving as silently as I did out of habit, I don’t know how he sensed me, but he looked up while I was still quite some distance away and watched me approach. The man was still on edge, clearly uncomfortable, and I wondered briefly if this had really been a good plan. True enough, the women I worked with would now abandon their pursuits of me, and granted, the party would allow me opportunities to overhear useful information, I could have just as easily ordered one of my subordinates to accompany me and serve the same purpose. As skilled as many were, they would surely have proved more convincing as apparent lovers, but I had also hoped to gain Jack’s goodwill by inviting him. Another subtle misjudgment, far too many for my liking despite my feeling that I understood him perfectly. Surely I understood his motivations, but his preferences continued to surprise me. Perhaps it was simply his complicated past. It would not have surprised me to learn that some element of the office party brought to mind his father or ex-lover.   
* * *  
My awkward uncertainty had remained as I waited for Vulpes to return and it managed to intensify when he did so. Now I just felt like I would embarrass him as well when I inevitably evoked social ridicule.   
It was hard to tell, but his default stare seemed to be slightly more of a frown as he walked up to me. “Do you wish to leave?”  
I hesitated. As much as I wanted to scream yes, even beg him to let me go, that seemed rude, and whatever the circumstance, above all else I wanted to be with either him or Arcade, and right now I was already with Vulpes. “I...dislike parties.”  
He stared and I knew what he was about to ask before he needed to say it, so I added quickly, “No. I will stay if you want to stay.”  
As usual, his reaction had all the transparence of a brick wall. He swept an arm towards me and before I realized what he was doing, he’d hooked my elbow in his arm and started leading me towards the party. The hallway had been deserted by the time he’d returned and I didn’t relish returning to the horde of American socialites who would probably be drinking and talking about celebrities or sports— two of the subjects I knew the least about.   
The party went better than I’d expected. Somehow I managed to avoid most of the attention. Vulpes mingled a little, but mostly he seemed content to stand with me near the wall and watch the goings on. I studied the people around me for character ideas and my own amusement; I suppose he had his own reasons for doing the same. I found out he spoke fluent Japanese when I tried to remark on the awkwardly minimalist state of most of the women’s costumes. Japanese, oddly enough, had been the first language that had come to mind when I sought to make the statement, and luckily we both spoke it well enough to make ourselves clear. With that discovery, we soon set about peppering our silent observations with Japanese conversation. It proved to be one of the strangest parties I’d ever experienced, and it only became stranger when one of his coworkers joined in.   
At least the man had the courtesy not to jump into the middle of the conversation; he approached me while Vulpes had gone to speak to a woman he’d been listening to. He hadn’t explained his reasons, but I had good hearing. He could apparently read lips, which I wasn’t very good at, but I’d caught enough to know that she was writing a follow-up article about the ships that had been sunk in the bay, so I assumed he was interested because of the article he’d interviewed me for about some gang connected to that.   
I must have blanched when the other journalist approached me because he laughed and assured in Japanese that he didn’t bite.   
“I’m Mark.” He stuck to Japanese, possibly presuming that I spoke little English and we shook hands.   
“Jack.”  
“I heard you discussing Halloween costumes.” He nodded discreetly at Vulpes. “Do you have any idea what he’s dressed as?”  
I shrugged. I’d assumed it was some American pop-culture reference. “Not a clue.”  
“Ah. So far I haven’t heard anyone who knows what he’s supposed to be.”  
“Must be a strange costume then. Probably the most obscure one here.”   
“Not necessarily. Jerry, who writes the travel section, has a rubber rhino mask, black armor, and a water pistol; we’re all too afraid to ask. Personally, I think they’re both the kind of person who might just make something up to fuck with the rest of us.”  
I glanced at Vulpes behind us. Somehow, that wouldn’t surprise me at all.   
“You aren’t actually Japanese, I guess you were just using it to speak privately?”  
I nodded. “First language that came to mind.”  
“You speak many? What languages do you speak? I thought I was the only linguist here.”  
I chuckled politely. “It’s more of a casual interest. I only know bits and pieces of most, but I’ve picked up some Latin, Gaelic, German, Arabic, Swahili, Mandarin, French, Russian, and, of course, Japanese.”   
“Russian?” he asked in Russian, “That seems like an odd choice. Tricky to pronounce.”  
I nodded. “Not so tricky as Mandarin. All the vowels give me more trouble.” I replied in a mix of Russian and English.   
“You speak Russian, Mr.Bureon?” In his usual way, Vulpes appeared beside me out of nowhere and joined the conversation. He spoke entirely in Russian and I only got the gist of his question because it was so basic.   
Mark jumped visibly, but recovered fast. “Oh, you too? You’re very good, I can’t hear almost any accent, you sound like a native speaker.” He switched to English and Vulpes followed suit in his reply.   
“I am generally very good at speaking any language without an accent, if I so choose.” Contradicting that statement, a Russian accent permeated his response so thoroughly that I barely understood him. He fell silent just a little more abruptly than I expected and I guessed that he hadn’t intended to speak that way.   
There was a pause. Outside of myself and Mark, no one seemed to have heard. “...Are you Russian, Todd?”  
Vulpes stared at Mark, clearly not planning to answer. After a few moments facing that resolute gaze, Mark awkwardly slunk away into the crowd. I considered Vulpes but said nothing. I knew better than to expect an explanation, but I did start to concoct a few theories about him being some kind of Russian agent or spy and why he was here.   
We fell silent and watched the party for a while longer, occasionally chatting and occasionally going off to get food and drink. I hadn’t really expected much aside from alcohol, and that had been an accurate guess: I mostly drank water and the occasional cola. Vulpes drank nothing but water and I don’t think I saw him sample any of the food, although I probably had a few too many of the chocolate cookies myself. The party was going a lot better than I’d expected.   
Music had been playing and there was a space cleared for dancing, but as the night went on people got too tired or too drunk and the dance floor cleared out. Well, the whole place cleared out, really. Around midnight, about half the guests had left either because they were tired, or drunk, or horny. Granted, that last one seemed like a pretty good reason; I half hoped Vulpes would see fit to leave soon for that one. I hoped I’d be a bit more able to handle his massive cock, but even if I wasn’t, more practice seemed likely to help. Besides, regardless of the pain involved I still wanted every inch of that hard, velvety member.   
I expected a suggestion along those lines when he looked up at me as I was pondering such things.   
“Do you know how to dance?”  
There it was, the question I’d been dreading from the start of the evening but hadn’t really expected him to ask. “Uh...kind of...”   
Man, the looks he gave me could petrify. “That is...I can dance...just not well...and...I...um, I don’t know many dances that would work with...with a partner.” Or be appropriate for this kind of party. Or song, for that matter.   
I guess he figured that I was just being shy, because he narrowed his eyes. He spoke in Japanese. “Why do you care what my coworkers think of you? Do you have any expectation of seeing them again? Besides, those who remain are far too drunk to remember more than the barest trace of this night.” He paused and added, probably for his own amusement at my reaction, “Frankly, I doubt that any of them would notice or recall if we simply fucked right here on the dance floor in front of them.”   
I blushed and found myself speechless. That idea really should not turn me on as much as it did. More to keep my mind off such enticing fantasies, I glanced around, considering the remaining guests. There weren’t many, no more than thirty in all and few looked sober enough to stand without leaning on something. Most of them were pretty involved with their dates anyway; he had a point, anything we did would probably go unnoticed.   
Perceiving my realization, he asked softly, “Do you wish to dance?”  
The question caught me more completely off-guard than anything he had previously said or done. I stared blankly. It took a moment for the reality of the question to actually get through. I nodded. “I...suppose.” Dancing. With another man. In public. Okay, in the presence of people who probably wouldn’t notice or remember, but still.   
He stepped towards me. “What dances do you know?”  
I was not a good dancer. I was not necessarily bad, per say, but my mother had often described my dancing as resembling a colt on Ritalin. I was not ungraceful, just unpredictable, and having often performed incredible gymnastic feats— mostly by sheer luck— my dancing tended to become ridiculous.   
Dancing with a partner, especially one as volatile and important to me as Vulpes, I wasn’t sure how to move. He led in something like a waltz, one of the handful of styles I knew. I could waltz, tap, and Scottish step-dance. He only said to follow his lead and clamped a hand to my waist. His grip was adamantine, hauling me with him, and I could no more resist than I could part the sea. Not that I wanted to. The height difference, I suppose, was laughable. He was nearly a head shorter than me and perfectly proportioned while I felt gangly and awkward and he moved like some kind of feline sex god and I galumphed around like a giraffe in galoshes, or at least that was how I felt.   
What I thought was a waltz fast became a quick twirling jig, some oddly graceful mix of waltzing and what might have been tap or swing with leg movements halfway between the kind of step-dancing I was good at and something else, something foreign even to me. I followed along as best as I could, mostly focused on trying not to step on his feet, but I like to think that I managed to look somewhat competent. There was no way I equalled him. He could maneuver me as if I weighed nothing. I found myself keenly aware that the ease and iron-strength of his every movement was almost certainly due to intense combat training, maybe karate, maybe some other method, but this was clearly a man who could easily kill without needing any conventional weapon. I found no comfort in my greater height and weight, but I did find some in the tentative faith that he probably wouldn’t kill me without provocation. Hopefully. Although I wasn’t entirely sure that missing a step in this dangerous, fast-paced dance wouldn’t be provocation enough.   
He was still an amazing dancer, even if the style he chose was strange. He handled me like I had handled my horse when I rode, effortlessly guiding me, turning me in ways that felt natural, shifting my balance so that my steps fell where he wanted them. He pivoted me towards him suddenly, jerking me forward until I fell. It had been an end to a means; a tactic to shift his grip to the music. He caught me, letting me dip so low that my head nearly touched the ground as he lunged forward so quickly that he seemed to teleport. I found him staring down at me, that subtle grin visible despite the dog head and dark goggles. He must have realized that he’d frightened me by doing that and he smiled more widely. Had he done that solely to remind me that I was completely and utterly at his mercy?   
He lifted me back to my feet and twirled me out and in. His grip on my hand was a vice and he used it to twist my arm, forcing me to follow the motion and spinning me back in until I practically ran into him. I was left pressed against him, panting a little from my attempts to keep up with his nimble steps, staring into the dark enigma of his ski goggles as my long hair settled into place over the arm on my back. The music died down. The five remaining guests stared at us in drunken awe and the DJ, the only sober person remaining, took off his hat and applauded. The five drunks clapped spasmodically and a few cheered. Well, that had gone better than I’d expected.   
For a long moment Vulpes stared, so long in fact that I thought he was going to kiss me. I was tempted to kiss him as well, in all honesty, but my crippling fear of doing so in public stayed my lips.   
* * *  
Perhaps pushing him into this was not the best tactic. I wanted to believe that I only sought Jack’s approval for the sake of his use to the Legion, or, more specifically, his money and the use it could be, but I knew that wasn’t entirely true. In truth, I was not sure why I so wanted him to like me, perhaps it was simply because he seemed to enjoy having sex with me, perhaps it was because I could be open with him, or perhaps there was another reason. Perhaps some part of me hoped to find some strange joy in rebefriending my half-sister’s brother.   
The fear in his eyes told me that pressing him further into the public eye might scare him off. I released him and stepped back, watching him regain his footing. He took half a step away from me but moved no further. A good sign, considering how very far he had come today. I was certain now that he had never publicly engaged in romance and suspected that he had only confessed such truths a handful of times, and most of those occasions had ended badly. One of them had ended very badly. I was not surprised that he now feared being openly gay in the public eye. It surprised me more that I had not expected him to act this way after what he had been through.   
According to a clock on the wall, it was three a.m. Once we separated, the inebriated guests, deprived of entertainment, settled down and sleepily departed. The DJ began to pack up and shut down the orange and purple party lights. I watched Jack as he stood, awaiting my next move like a loyal hound. Watching him now, one would assume that he had no independence whatsoever, but a man with no autonomy could never have produced his volume of work or earned as much money as he now possessed. He was competent, but only when alone, whenever he had someone to instruct him, he immediately forfeited all power and deferred to their judgement. And he was doing so now, not that I was not used to it. Yet somehow I found it mildly repellant. The man had spent so long cowed by his domineering mother that now as an adult he could not make his own judgements whenever he had anyone available to obey. I would not allow any man related to or having sex with me to act so meekly. I resolved to cure him of this.   
Granted, by no means did I intent to change him in such a way that he would no longer submit to me in the kind of ways that I liked, but I could not let any man so connected to me act with so little self-respect when in public. Jack was no slave.   
* * *  
As the DJ packed up Vulpes turned towards the door and gestured for me to follow. Between the dancing and ending pressed up against him before we’d stepped apart, my heart was pounding and not entirely due to exertion. I was tired, of course I was tired, between having been awake for so long and having danced that quickly for what must have been at least fifteen minutes straight, but the pace of my heartbeat and the heat in my chest, ears, and to some degree groin where for entirely different reasons. I had no idea if he could even have sex right now, he was probably still injured, but he was hiding it stupendously.   
I doubted that his thoughts were on such things, but when he led me past the elevator towards his office, I dared to hope.   
I saw the painting I had done above the desk, framed in finely polished wood. I liked how it had turned out, but every flaw, every place where the color didn’t blend right or the anatomy hadn’t quite worked, glared like a fire to my eyes. I had worried that he might not like it, but I guess he did, I hoped he did. Hanging it there and framing it, it seemed like he must like it.   
He had an array of books I half glanced at and a small army of strange objects on his otherwise utilitarian desk. A few could be used for work, a pencil sharpener, a fancy pen, a taxidermy rattlesnake with a mouth that served as a stapler, but the vast majority were purely decorative. I saw a toy car, a North Pole snow globe, and a bird skull. Even my imagination couldn’t conjure a reason for him to have all these things and he didn’t seem the type to hoard random trinkets, let alone display them.   
Vulpes stood by his desk and paused. He had to still be injured and I knew that, but I’d just figured that whatever he was taking for it numbed him completely. That didn’t seem to be the case; he just hid his pain very well. The tension of his jaw, the subtle hunch of his shoulders and the way that intensity to his stare seemed just a little sharper— he was definitely not numbed. He paused for a moment and I realized that he was doing that because of the pain. I wanted to help him...somehow. My first instinct was to kiss him. I wasn’t drunk, of course, but I was tired, and maybe it was the vulnerability of him being injured or maybe it was just how uncharacteristically gentle he had seemed this evening, but I acted on that impulse without really thinking.   
I stepped forward, resting my hands lightly on his hips and feeling both the corded muscles and the thick fabric of the bandages. I pressed my lips against his in a chaste kiss. I didn’t go for tongue even though I was really horny, and that was probably for the best. When I broke the kiss and looked at him, that slight tension had spread throughout his body and his eyes glinted more lethally than ever. Okay, that had been a terrible idea.   
* * *  
Jack kissed me. I had planned to warn him about Lanius, I had planned to let him know about an opportunity for him to openly serve the Legion, to let Caesar and the others know he was an ally and hopefully limit Lanius’ ability to openly attack him, I had planned to tell him important information, _this was not the time for such things._ The act caught me completely off-guard. My pain had me distracted and I’d determined that I could relax around Jack. Maybe I’d relaxed a bit too much; he sensed weakness. No, it did not matter if he sensed weakness, he had not reason to wish me harm. He was far more vulnerable than I had ever been and I could use his affection to ensure that he would serve the Legion— and myself— unwaveringly.   
I was not often kissed, less so from men and even less so for pleasure. I had not been kissed for someone else’s pleasure in over nine years. Those times had not been pleasant. Sufficient to say that life in the Legion had not been pleasant until I had become the fighter that I was now.   
His kiss triggered the hostility that those memories evoked. Had I not been so skilled at controlling myself, I would likely have killed him. As it was I froze. Those men were not here; this was Jack. Jack had no desire to harm me, and even if he had, I could easily defend myself. I was completely in control, control of this relationship, control of myself, control of most of what mattered, and everything else, I could anticipate and prepare for. I was completely in control here.  
* * *  
Mistake made, I froze, half expecting a gunshot, or the flash of a blade, or just some lightning-quick unarmed strike to sever an artery. None came. He stayed very still, his muscles straining against the bones, locking himself in place by application of force rather than by lack of it. The resultant tension looked unnatural, almost painful, like a rope stretched until it frayed and snapped. I felt the same kind of pain when my PTSD made my body shake. Wait... I considered the harsh still of his stance, the intensity of his stare... even with his enigmatic expressions, that could be fear in his eyes. Did he have PTSD? Was it even possible that this man who was so focused, so ruthless, who seemed nigh invincible to me might have PTSD?   
Slowly, his muscles relaxed a little, still tense from the pain but no longer tearing against each other. The fear in his eyes reverted to the guarded calm that was his default expression.   
I still wanted to comfort him, somehow, or even just please him, distract him, give him something better to focus on. I know that I would like that myself, at least most of the time. Once he seemed calm enough that he wouldn’t kill me, I knelt. I think I surprised him when I clasped my hands behind my back and rubbed my nose very gently against his crotch. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but in retrospect, I suspect that I clasped my hands behind me to mimic bondage so he would feel more in control. If a kiss triggered PTSD, maybe he’d been raped? I didn’t realize this at the time either, at least not consciously.   
For a long moment, he stared at me and I thought he was just going to hit me or at least refuse, but then he seemed to relax. Vulpes leaned back a little against his desk and unbuckled the belt that held the odd leather skirt of his costume, letting it fall to the floor. He wasn’t hard yet, but I hadn’t expected him to be. I was only partly hard myself, and that was more because with my libido I got boners like Miami got humid days. He had tantalizingly tight black shorts beneath that thing. I found it a little unnerving to realize that we had the same taste in underwear.   
I couldn’t focus on that for long. He took it out and then leaned back. I guess he was still in pain, but as long as he was alright with this, I had ways to help. Even flaccid, he was fucking huge, but now I knew I could handle that. Granted, the last time I had handled it, I’d had to visit the hospital, but it had been well worth it. The pain was half the fun, and I would not forfeit any instant of that for the ability to take him painlessly.   
Now that the object of my lust was out in the open, hanging tantalizingly inches from my face, I went at it. Even before I made my first move, I could see that the heat of my breath or maybe just the nature of the moment was effecting him: the cock nearly touching my face twitched and started, slowly, to rise. Now that turned me on even more. I felt my own straining against my fly to join it.   
I slid my tongue out, running it lightly along his shaft and then his tip and then stretching it out and around the head of his cock to lift it faster and pull it into my lips, which then flexed to engulf it. I slid my mouth up to his base, feeling him harden and grow back into my throat and hoping I’d be able to breath this time. I sucked hard at him, running my tongue back and forth along what hot and velvety skin I could reach. I heard nothing from him but a slight increase in the pace of breathing, but I hadn’t expected much. The man was an enigma as always, but he wasn’t stopping me, which I took as a good sign. I wanted him to enjoy this. I hoped he was enjoying it. It wasn’t as if I’d really gotten a critique on this kind of thing at any point in my life, so I really could only hope. For all I know I was horrible “in bed” as it were, but I guess my popularity as an erotic writer suggested otherwise.   
Aside from getting steadily harder and breathing faster, little by little, I got no reaction from him even as I started bobbing my head into his groin, taking him in to the base. Part of me wanted to reach up, touch his balls, stroke his thighs, but another part wanted to maintain the illusion that I was bound. I could breathe, surprisingly, or at least I could manage well enough that I wasn’t suffocating. I still felt a little light-headed, gasping in air around his massive cock, but I could manage. The veins pulsed against my tongue but he didn’t thrust. I wondered vaguely if he chose not to because of his wound.   
Or maybe it was simply because he had other plans.   
Vulpes abruptly grabbed my necktie and pushed me down off his cock, sitting me down on the floor until I was forced to release him simply because I could no longer reach with anything but the very tip of my tongue. The instant my mouth left his tip, he hauled me to my feet by my tie, pressing the silk up against my throat and briefly choking me. To my great surprise, he pulled me into a kiss, lips closed, but hard, passionate even, maybe, or he might just be faking very well. I’d figured that this was just for sex thus far, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe this terrifying, squaline, shark-like man had feelings for me? Was that even possible? Before I could really consider it, he broke the kiss.   
“I wish to inform you of an opportunity to serve the leader of the organization I represent.”  
He paused for breath and I added, a bit confused by the sudden change in topic and more than a little distracted by sex. “What? Is this business or pleasure?”  
Abruptly, Vulpes turned me around pushed me against his desk and bending me over it. The speed of the change in position threw me off after the unexpected kiss.   
He unbuckled my belt and jerked it free of my pants so fast that the end slapped against the wall with a deafening crack. The sensation distracted me more than the sound: I was hard. Pulling that belt out, pulling the thick leather tight against my pants pressed the fabric painfully tight against my cock, which was currently poking up beneath the button of my slacks. That was one of many reasons that I didn’t wear shirts tucked into my pants.   
He pressed up behind me, letting me feel his erection against my ass while he reached in front of me and held the belt in his other hand.   
“I do not consider the two to be mutually exclusive.”  
I’m not sure if he noticed my cock when he undid the button of my slacks which also pressed the fabric against it although this time that felt less painful and more pleasantly tight. He couldn’t miss my penis when he unzipped my fly. Gripping the zipper one handed, he slid one finger behind it to pull it down, stroking my shaft in the process. I couldn’t help but shudder with pleasure at that. Even unable to see his expression, he paused and I knew he was grinning.   
He jerked my pants off my hips and let them fall as he rammed himself into me. Knowing he was injured, I hadn’t expected the amount of force he mustered. He nearly knocked me over with his first thrust. He had me positioned so that I wouldn’t jostle any of the carefully arranged trinkets on his desk but the angle practically forced me to stare at them, especially as he took my hands behind my back and used my belt to bind them. I didn’t take note of them at the time.   
Stripped below the waist, the posture and force of his thrusts squeezed my cock between the polished wooden surface of his desk and my own abdomen in such a way that the motion as he slammed into me rubbed it back and forth. I bit back a moan, hoping he wouldn’t get annoyed if I came on his desk. That was pretty inevitable if he kept on like this.   
Vulpes pulled up on the belt, bending my broken arm painfully enough that I gasped. Damn that was good.   
“More.”   
The word left my lips before I realized I was speaking, and rather than getting angry, he leaned forward and replied, “You are the most impertinent partner I have ever had.” Even so, he thrust into me even harder, hilting himself each time and making me ache in more ways than one. He leaned forward against me, I could feel his shallow breaths against my back but couldn’t tell if they were so rapid due to pain or ecstasy.   
Abruptly, Vulpes nipped my shoulder. It wasn’t exactly a love bite, or maybe it was by his standards but he broke the skin, tearing pretty deep, all things considered. The pain shocked me enough that I came and my orgasm made him join me. He hadn’t released me after he’d bitten and his mouth stayed locked onto my back, tightening a little as he came and staying tight with what I suspected was pain. I could feel the bandages against my back, feel how warm they were.   
“Vulpes?”  
He stayed very still, his jaw shaking against my shoulder. The man was in agony, he had to be, I knew how that kind of wound felt and it was awful, especially if it reopened. I wasn’t exactly comfortable myself; the corner of the desk jabbed into my balls, my broken arm was pinned beneath him at a bad angle, and taking his gigantic cock at the wild pace he’d been thrusting didn’t exactly leave my ass in the best condition. I still wasn’t bleeding from a reopened gunshot to the gut. At the time, it didn’t even occur to me that such a wound could prove fatal.   
Beneath him, the best course of action seemed to be to wait, to stay still and hope his pain passed. It must have been fifteen minutes or more; I couldn’t see a clock, but eventually Vulpes released my shoulder. He pulled out and backed up slowly. I could tell that he was still hurting, just not as badly. He hid it more completely than I had ever expected, even from him. Straightening my back made me ache like I’d eaten hot coals, but I could deal with that; I was more worried about him, even just thinking that his worst case scenario was severe pain. Vulpes had himself dressed and presentable before I even turned around. I could only tell that he was in pain and bleeding because I knew it was true: looking carefully, I saw the tension in his neutral expression, the slight watering of his blank gaze, and the faint wetness of his already crimson tunic. I pulled my pants back up and made myself decent more to give him time rather than to preserve any modesty I might have left. I don’t think I did have any left; at this point I saw no reason to shy from him, but maybe that was just exhaustion combining with orgasm.   
Even with my delay, he took a few moments before he spoke in a quiet, controlled tone. Every word was measured and strained. He was still in pain, he was just trying to hide it. I guess I understood that sentiment.   
“I have mentioned you to my...leader. He wishes to request a portrait from you.”  
I thought for a moment, a little confused by the vague wording. “...would this be a commission, or...?”  
* * *  
“Payment would be in gratitude from an especially influential man. You would not be paid, nor would it be wise to spread word of this favor, but those involved with my organization would know that you serve our leader.” I could not openly ask for his monetary aid, at this point, as I had explained to Caesar, but the portrait would serve to prove his loyalty as well as to stroke Caesar’s ego. It had been Caesar’s idea. Paying Jack would be counterproductive in many ways, and asking for his funding now could easily lead him to believe that my only interest was in his wealth. There were many reasons that I would not risk this alliance by asking that question too early.   
Jack considered and nodded. He still wasn’t loyal to Caesar, of course, he was doing this for me. I doubted that he even knew what organization I spoke of, but he would aid the Legion simply because I asked him to. I would earn his loyalty first and then I would make him loyal to the Legion.   
“I will admit, there are other reasons that this more open support of my organization could be very valuable,” I continued, “I have reason to believe that a powerful rival of mine wishes you harm. Serving our leader would make it difficult for him to go about this openly.”  
* * *  
That didn’t worry me nearly as much as it should have, and even that was a massive understatement now that I can look back on that night in the frumentari’s office.   
“Oh. Yeah, that seems smart. ...is he the reason you got shot?” I wanted to ask if he was okay, but he stopped me by the intensity of the glare I got for that first question. I shouldn’t have asked. To my surprise, he forced that scowl to soften just a little.   
“The reason is related,” he admitted, looking out the tinted windows on the vast and glittering city. We both fell silent for a few more minutes and I saw him rest a hand on his abdomen, holding the wound whether he realized he was doing so or not. I suspected that he did because he seemed so in control of all his actions, but it seemed so contrary to what I knew of him...   
Those steel eyes flicked back up to me. “I would also avoid wandering town for a while. He might have plans already in motion; be wary.”  
I nodded but said nothing. We lapsed into silence again for a long time. I noticed, after a while, that he was slowly relaxing. Little by little, he looked less tense, less in pain, and eventually the wetness on his tunic seemed to dry.   
Vulpes checked his watch.   
“I should return you.”  
His phrasing provoked a quizzical stare.   
He ignored or simply missed it, walking out of the office and into the elevator. We were leaving the building when I remembered my worrying dream. Part of me wanted to ignore it, but I knew that if anything happened, if that boy had been right, if somehow my dreams could really predict the future, I would never forgive myself. It was stupid. It was absolutely ridiculous. It was insane. But I still had to tell him. The alternative was far worse than the embarrassment of seeming to be crazy. I couldn’t consider the possibility that it might be right, and I might lose someone else who had become so important to me.   
I didn’t think of a way to tell him as we walked to his car. No option presented itself on the drive back to the stairs. I still drew a blank as we got out of his car and he nodded formally, his version of a farewell.   
But at that point, it was now or never. In the foggy and gray pre-dawn, the street was deserted. He paused with one hand on the car door, noticing that I wasn’t leaving.   
“Yes?”  
“Vulpes...”  
That blank stare seemed somewhere between amusement and annoyance. He was probably exhausted. And probably still in some pain, even if he was feeling better than before.   
“...I can’t tell you how I know this...”  
That stare intensified, becoming much more serious.   
“...but on the third of November...”  
I hesitated. He waited, watching me so raptly that I felt as if the world could end around us and he would still be staring in resolute attention.   
“...please...don’t go to your office building.”  
He waited for more explanation, but I offered none and slowly he nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.”  
He got into the car and drove off. I watched him go, more because I was lost in my thoughts than for any other reason. As his black sports car slipped away down the steep hills, I glimpsed a distinct pale green Beetle heading up towards the stairs. And _that_ was my cue to get home and pretend I hadn’t just had sex.   
* * *  
I found Jack in the shower when I got back from work. I was tired, but it had actually been a good night for once, and I had off tomorrow. In the kitchen I found Rex eating his dinner and a barely legible note explaining that Jack had already eaten and fed the dog. I wasn’t sure if the note struck me as overly domestic or made him sound as if he were dog-sitting himself. I was too tired to put much thought into the answer. Granted, it was still a bit early, but I wanted to sleep as soon as I wasn’t quite so hungry. Besides, tomorrow would hopefully be a good, if eventful, day.   
* * *  
Showers always provoked thought for me. I don’t know what it was about the hot water and steam, but I always found myself thinking, whether I was pondering the meaning of life or just wondering what to cook for dinner. This time, my thoughts were more immediate. Something about Vulpes’ office was bothering me. Something in there had stirred an old memory, and not one of the traumatic ones for a change. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t the view out the windows. It wasn’t his wound, although I had had and seen similar in the past. It wasn’t the sex; I hadn’t actually had sex with anyone else, surprisingly. At least not yet. What was it, then?  
Idly washing my hair for the fifteen time in a row, it dawned on me. My eyes widened so much that I got soap in them and had to take five minutes to wash it out. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t made the connection at the time. While I’d been bent over the desk, for all the minutes that Vulpes had fucked me, I’d been staring right at it and I only recognized the thing right now. Among the trinkets on his desk, among the souvenirs, and staplers, and odd little crystals, there had been a fox. An old, faded stuffed fox with a scratch on one plastic eye and a few stripes of blue and black where small tears had been carefully stitched over a decade ago. A very familiar stuffed fox. The stuffed fox I had given to that boy in Siberia.


	17. Victim of Circumstance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. ^w^' Also, this chapter got a little unexpected, I hadn't really planned on any of it, it sort of just happened, so prepare for Jack's bad luck to take a turn for the worst...

Arcade was lying in bed reading by the time I emerged from the shower.  He looked almost as tired as I felt.  He glanced up at me.  “Are you alright?  You look exhausted.”  

I nodded and flopped into bed beside him, snuggling under the blankets and lying on my stomach, my broken arm beneath my pillow.  We looked at each other for a while and I got the sense that he expected me to say something as much as I expected him to say something.  Eventually, I closed my eyes to break the awkward moment.  I must have fallen asleep in a matter of seconds.  

I slept soundly for most of the night, but I hardly expected to sleep peacefully all night long with my track record.  I had another vivid nightmare, more unsettling than usual for the fact that I recognized it as another prediction dream.  Most of my prediction dreams I viewed as if they were films, I felt the events but was not directly involved, although there had been a few exceptions.  Tonight was one such dream.  

At first, it began like the others.  I saw a beautiful woman with a rugged man, her husband, I presumed.  I knew neither of them, although the man looked familiar.  He looked military.  The woman was pregnant.  She walked the stairs.  I don’t know why, I never saw where they lived in the dream, but she walked across the stairs, past my house, and down to the road.  Someone yelled to her from a house down there.  I didn’t hear the voice or see the speaker, but the woman snapped a disgusted response and walked on.  I didn’t assume it had been a man hitting on her, even though I normally would have, somehow I knew it was something more hostile.  

The dream skipped ahead to that same woman, still very pregnant, lying asleep in her bed.  Her husband was out, working, or so I understood from the dream.  Someone opened the door and I watched as two men and another, older woman broke into the house.  The older woman leapt onto the other, gagging her and the men held her down.  She pressed her hands against the pregnant woman’s throat just until the woman passed out and then released her.  I watched them drag her from the bedroom.  In that same inexplicable way, I knew that her captors were the people from the house down the street as much as I knew that she was now dead.  

With terrifying alacrity, the dream shifted perspective.  I faced the older woman whom I sensed had led the kidnapping, but I couldn’t see her clearly.  She had her hands around my neck.  I felt her starting to squeeze.  

I jolted awake sitting up so fast that the blankets flew to my feet.  It didn’t help that it took me a second to register where I was.  I didn’t even notice Arcade until he sat up as well.  

“Jack?”

*       *       *

He looked absolutely terrified, but it wasn’t PTSD.  He was tense, but not locked in place and he didn’t have that distant look, this was just a normal nightmare.  He looked over at me and shook his head.  “Sorry...again.”

“It’s alright.  You’ve been through a lot.”

*       *       *

Yeah, but this wasn’t a flashback.  I nodded anyway, it was true enough, and lay back down.  It took a while for my heartbeat to go back to normal and I was still freaked out.  That had felt _way_ too real.  I stared at the canopy over the bed, only comfortable closing my eyes once I calmed down, so I guess it was obvious that I was still pretty shaken.  Arcade lay back down and pulled me into a gentle hug.  Given my usual disregard for my own safety, it should come as no surprise that I didn’t usually scare easily, at least not the kind of mortal terror that dream had managed to put into me.  This was how I felt in car crashes, that pure fear that wasn’t easily shaken.  The hug helped.  He had broader shoulders than I did, and being taller than me, his whole body just kind of fit around me.  

I’d had vivid, personal nightmares like this before, and usually they meant that I was too on edge to sleep for at least a day afterwards, but that hug worked miracles.  Somehow, I felt completely safe and that really surprised me.  This was a man I barely knew, granted, he had saved my life at least once, but I’d only known him about a week and in truth I didn’t really know that much about him.  I didn’t know why he carried a gun, though I guess it made sense given where his apartment had been.  He really knew how to use it too, I’d say he had military training, but he seemed nothing like a soldier.  He had a very high-caliber pistol, obvious training to use it, and no explanation at all for either, and yet I felt like I could trust him completely.  Not only that, I felt absolutely safe in his arms, like nothing in the whole world could hurt me, even with my luck.  Granted, with Vulpes I felt similarly with the very notable exception that I knew he could end my life quite effortlessly the instant he chose to do so.  

I hugged Arcade back as best as I could with my one good arm and I’m still surprised by how quickly I fell back asleep.  

The next afternoon went fairly smoothly, at first.  Arcade apparently had some errand to run, so he left straight after we ate breakfast together and we didn’t have time to do more than that.  Rex adjusted pretty quickly to having Arcade around, he even seemed to take a liking to the sexy doctor.  Once Arcade left, I found myself bored.  I’d just spent several weeks writing and painting and I felt no desire to go back to that right now.  I’d sent the book I’d finished to my publisher and I was ready for a break from creative endeavors, although just what I wanted to do now remained a mystery.  

My dream returned to my mind and gave me an idea.  That was just a dream.  I nearly laughed aloud, whatever the coincidences, it was stupid to think that I somehow dreamed the future.  I could prove that now.  I’d go down the street to that house and if it wasn’t that woman, then I was wrong.  It was probably someone perfectly normal.  Heck, the house might not even be occupied at all.  

It was just a dream.  Besides, there was no harm in checking.  

Rex whined when I stood, as if he knew where I was going.  “It’s fine, Rex.  Wait here.”  I pushed past him and set out, my usual jeans and shirt a bit less paint-stained today.  The house wasn’t far.  I hadn’t paid it any attention before, but I must have noticed it in passing because it looked exactly as I had dreamed it.  The afternoon was a little gloomy, fog hung low over the city and cast everything in grey.  

A sign outside advertised the house as the “Dino Deelite Bed and Breakfast.”  The sign, oddly enough, was in the shape of a very stylized dinosaur, which seemed a bit creepy given the very traditional almost victorian look of the house.  It still wasn’t any evidence that my dream was somehow real.  

I was tempted to knock on the door, but I paused, wondering what I was going to say if anyone answered.  As it turned out, I never needed to knock.  A fairly pleasant-looking woman answered the door.  Her hair was tied back in a bun and she wore very clean glasses and a neat, if old fashioned dress.  I swear she’d stepped out of the forties and the effect remained somewhere between inviting and alarming.  

“Hello!  Do you have a room reserved?”  She stepped back as I shook my head, holding the door open.  I think she assumed I was a guest, but I wasn’t sure what to do, so I took the invitation and went awkwardly inside.  “Would you like a room?  Or some tea and cookies?”

Okay, tea and cookies sounded amazing, but this woman still gave me the creeps and there was something odd about her house.  I couldn’t tell if she was really the woman from my dreams or if there was anything visibly wrong that I had subconsciously noticed about her, but she unnerved me.  And I felt like there were other people in the eerily silent house.  I ignored my instincts.  “Alright.  I don’t really want a room, though.”

I was nervous enough that she could hear my accent.  “Scottish?  We don’t get many Scottish tourists, dear.  You here to see the piers?”

“Eh, well...”  I really did not want this creepy lady to know I lived just up the stairs.  I struggled to conjure up some reasonable lie.  I knew no hotels in the area, so I couldn’t really lie about having another hotel.  “Yeah.  I guess.  I’m just here to sight see, a bit, I’m staying with my um aunt.”  Damn, why was I such a bad liar sometimes?  I was unnerved.  I could only lie if I was calm.  Why did this woman freak me out so much?  It had just been a stupid dream.  

She led me to a back room and gestured for me to sit down.  I didn’t.  I did take one of the cookies she offered, though, not thinking anything about them.  A board creaked behind me and I jumped.  It was behind a closed door.  

The woman laughed pleasantly and reassured, “Oh, that’s just my little nephew, he’s shy.”

That sure hadn’t sounded like a nephew.  It sounded like a grown man, maybe even bigger than I was.  I said nothing, figuring I’d just flee as soon as I finished the cookie.  My stomach and my libido could get me to do practically anything.  At least when sugar was involved in the former case; I never forgot to eat when there was cake in the house.  

The woman shifted abruptly, keeping her friendly smile, but seeming almost suspicious.  “Where does your aunt live, anyway?”

I hesitated.  “...nearby.”

“Nearby where?”

“Um...”

“Why don’t you stay here?  You don’t really have a place to stay do you?  Why don’t you stay?  We have a room open.”

I shook my head, “Sorry.  This just...this doesn’t seem like my kind of place...”

Now she was angry.  It was like a switch had flicked and she stood up.  “Not your kind of place, is it?  Well, where have I heard that before.  Not _anyone’s_ kind of place now, is it?  All you young people want your big city hotel chains, not nice little bed and breakfasts anymore, no!”

I stepped back, cookies forgotten.  Now my thoughts were more on fight or flight.  I glanced towards the still-open door.  

Only it wasn’t still open.  The door had been closed, silently, probably by the man now standing in the hallway.  He was big, heavily muscled, dressed in all black and red.  I heard the door open behind me and suspected another man was there was well.  I started to turn, thinking to fight them because I probably had no other options, and the woman lunged at me.  Her hands closed around my throat, as wrinkled and gnarled as in my dream.  I blacked out before I knew what was happening.  

~        ~        ~

I came to cold in a steel cage.  We were somewhere dark and I wasn’t alone, but the woman was gone.  The metal bottom of the cage had been encrusted with filth I didn’t even try to identify; I could feel it digging into my bare skin.  I’d been completely stripped.  My cage was so small that I could barely move; it was probably a dog cage and it held me curled with my knees against my chest, unable to stretch out even a little.  It also restricted my view a fair bit, but I could both see and smell other people in cages around me.  I think we were in a truck, but maybe it was the cargo hold of a small ship, or a very utilitarian room.  A heavy steel door sealed us in the near total darkness.  A sack in one corner held what looked suspiciously like a corpse.  For a painfully long time, I was alone with the people in cages, listening to them.  Many of them whimpered or cried.  Apparently, they’d already learned not to try to break out.  Looking at the cage door, even in the dark, I could already tell that it would be futile.  A few whispered to each other, asking questions in half a dozen languages.  What I could understand suggested that they were all tourists, most of whom had stopped by the B&B but never officially rented a room.  But the others had been picked up all over the city.  Wait a second, hadn’t Vulpes once mentioned an organization of slavers?  I couldn’t remember what he’d said about them.  

The door slid open abruptly, producing an echoing rattle that managed to be almost as terrifying as the men who entered.  The first was almost laughable, not frightening in the least beyond the power dynamic.  He seemed to be a sort of salesman.  He was small, ordinarily looking, and spoke rapidly in Latin.  What little I knew of the language led me to suspect that he was marketing us, trying to sell us as slaves to either of the men behind him.  I caught numerous terms of respect in the man’s rapid Latin.  Even if I hadn’t understood him, their rank or at least their position over him was easily evident from his posture and nervous tone.  

With the door open, daylight filtered in and I could see that not only were all of us captured slaves naked, but we were all quite young and fit, many attractive.  I was on the left side of the room as were all the men while the right side held a wide array of women.  The salesman gestured mainly towards them, pointing out various features while the terrified and confused caged women flinched at his gestures.  

He had two potential buyers inside, though I saw other men looking in from the doorway.  I got the sense that these two apparently had first dibs on slaves, which was lucky, I hoped.  I knew one of them.  Vulpes, in black and red with a dark hat low on his head, cast me the most enigmatic gaze and seemed to survey all the other cages with little interest.  He showed no sign that he had even seen me beyond that slight but pointed stare.  I prayed he’d do something.  

Vulpes himself was terrifying, as always, even if he was probably my only hope in this awful adventure I’d gotten myself into.  I still thought of it as an adventure, despite the situation.  This was something that had never happened to me before and that made it exciting.  Even if “exciting” would probably end in rape, torture, and eventual death after a long and degrading life of servitude.  Yeah.  On second thought, adventure had been had, I wanted out of here now.  

The other potential buyer was the most terrifying man I had ever seen.  He was easily the largest man I’d ever heard of, probably eight feet tall and build like a grizzly.  He wore what had to be a Halloween costume: red sports gear, leather, and a red and gold mask as elaborate as it was terrifying.  I recognized him from the Gomorrah, that first night, and now I recalled Vulpes at the same place.  Perhaps he was a double agent or something?  Even so, as long as their organization no longer tried to kill me...  

I couldn’t see his eyes, and he spent a good while considering the shivering women, but then I got the sense that he was looking at me...and he almost seemed to smirk.  That sent a chill through my aching spine.  Nope, I wanted out of here, right the hell now, before that monster had a chance to try anything with me.  

Still staring at me, he said something in Latin.  A number.  The small man replied.  He was bidding on me.  Shit.  The small man walked towards my cage, seeming to accept the offer.  He drew out a key.  His hand was on the lock.  

My heart nearly stopped when I heard Vulpes’ quiet but insistent remark.  Another number.  The small man froze.  Whoever the hulking man in the mask was, he countered the offer, doubling his original price, whatever it had been.  Vulpes did the same.  And again, when the giant raised his price once more.  Apparently, that was his limit.  The man in the mask stared at Vulpes so angrily that I could feel his hate even if I couldn’t see his expression.  I still can’t believe that they didn’t fly at each other right then like rabid dogs, both of them had such lethal intent in their stares.  The small man didn’t dare interrupt, and I hardly blamed him.  

After a full ten minutes, Vulpes broke the stare and paid the auctioneer, taking the key to unlock my cage himself.  He dragged me out so roughly that I nearly fell face first on the floor, my stiff limbs struggled to unfold and let me walk.  There was a very tense exchange in Latin that I didn’t understand mostly because Vulpes held me in an arm lock using my broken arm.  It was absolutely agonizing, and right now I was too terrified to enjoy that.  Vulpes seemed to hold some kind of rank here, at least, and I hoped to whatever god there might be that he could use that power to safely get me out of here.  He got me out of the shipping container, at the very least.  That was what it turned out to be.  I’d never seen the inside of one before, but we were in a shipping yard.  The whole place crawled with muscular men in red and black.  The Legion, I guessed, recalling the name.  There was a building nearby and Vulpes dragged me into it, to a deserted back room.  

He shut the door, maintaining his perfect illusion of calm even as he turned back to face me and I heard the incredible tension in his voice.  “What the hell are you doing here?!”  He spoke Japanese, and he didn’t shout, but it was still as close to hysterics as I’d ever seen him get.  I couldn’t tell if he was massively angry or legitimately worried about me.  Either would be a surprise, I suppose, I was starting to think that he never got visibly angry.  Granted, he acted far more stoic that I expected for the sheer fury that his tone and stare conveyed, but still.  

I raised my hands, trying to figure out how to explain that, but before I could try, he rummaged in a trunk near the door and threw me some clothes.  “Dress.”

It was an order and I obeyed, having no desire to make him any more upset with me.  As it was, I felt like I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire; I half expected him to kill me, although I was starting to wonder if that was really as likely as it seemed.  He hadn’t killed me yet.  I wondered if somehow he actually did care about me more than he let on, now that I knew he was the boy I’d met in Siberia.  Maybe there was still some trace of that happy, gentle child under all the deadly gazes.  

The clothes were simple, loose and tattered black shorts and a crimson shirt, but they were at least relatively clean.  I wasn’t sure if they were his or not and didn’t think so.  I tried to explain as he frowned, apparently considering my appearance.  “I was talking to a woman down the street from my house.  I guess she got the jump on me— there were two big guys with her, to be fair.  She must have sold me here.”  I paused, tense for a lot of reasons as he wordlessly started towards me.  He took a black bandana off a table and I could only guess what he planned to do with that.  “I-um I had a dream about her, honestly, I only went there to convince myself it wasn’t real.  ...I guess it kind of was.”  I laughed and he stared.  

“What do you mean by that?  Hold still.”  I did as asked, half expecting him to bind my hands.  

“I dreamt that she sold a pregnant woman to slavery and then somehow caught me, knocked me out, and sold me as well.  Like I said, I thought it was just a dream.”  

He hesitated, holding the bandana behind my neck.  He frowned.  “You dreamt this?”

I nodded.  As usual, he didn’t explain.  He just focused back on the bandana and then on my hair.  I could only feel it brushing the back of my neck, he was so careful with it, and then he tied the bandana around my forehead.  I felt him knotting it in the back somewhere to and then he grabbed a small baseball cap from somewhere nearby and threw it on my head.  I stayed very still, absolutely baffled, but trusting that whatever his purpose for dressing me, he had some point in mind.  In rapid succession, he got my feet in plain black sandals, threw a black hoodie over my shoulders, and carefully dabbed stuff on my face and hands.  Finally, I couldn’t stand the confusion.  “What are you doing?”

Granted, I did have a tendency to be clueless sometimes, but given everything that had happened today, I found his scathing stare, as if I was a complete idiot, hardly justified.  “I am ensuring that you are not recognized on your return home.”  He pulled a mirror from his pocket and handed it to me.  I stared at him.  Vulpes, Vulpes fucking Inculta, the most deadly man I had ever knowingly met up to that point, carried a mirror on him.  ...I guess it made sense.  I looked at my reflection and marveled for the second time.  _I_ couldn’t recognize myself.  I looked like a completely different person.  How had he done that?  The man was incredible.  

He had papers in his hand when I looked back up and he swapped them for the mirror before I knew what he’d done.  “You will find a man named Craig Boone at the party tonight.  He will likely appear surly.  Give him these documents.  If he asks, tell him what happened to you today.  He knows the woman who did this.  She will be taken care of.”  In this case, I was pretty sure he meant “taken care of” the same way the godfather did.  I wasn’t really sure what to think of that on a whole lot of levels.  

“How do you know that?”  Another blank stare.  “Right.  Craig Boone, give him the papers and tell him what happened if he asks.  He a friend of yours or something?”

I swear he almost laughed.  “Hardly.  But the man is predictable.  He will serve his purpose in this matter.”

“Alright.”

I think he expected me to ask another question but I didn’t.  I didn’t expect to get any more information out of him.  “Come with me.”

I managed to be almost calm as he led me outside and down several dark back alleys to a plain silver Ford.  The man he’d met with last night waited by the car and stared when he saw me.  This wasn’t a stare of surprise, more of confusion.  I guess he thought that he should recognize me, but didn’t.  

Vulpes approached him.  “There’s been a change of plans, drive this man to the house that previously belonged to Ulysses.  We will conduct our business later tonight.”  He seemed to mean that he was postponing some scheduled thing to get me home.  I wondered what it was, but didn’t dare to ask.  The man didn’t ask questions either, he didn’t even ask my name, but nor did he introduce himself.  He got into the driver’s seat and I took the hint, praying he was a good enough driver that he wouldn’t set off my PTSD.  

I expected the drive to be silent, but it wasn’t.  A few minutes in, he frowned at me and asked.  “You are not a member of the Legion, are you?”

I was torn between honesty and caution, but there wasn’t much he could do while driving without risking both our lives, so I chanced the truth.  “No.  My name’s Jack, by the way.”

I was trying to be friendly, and to my surprise he responded with almost the same emotion.  He was still guarded, but he sounded amiable enough now.  “I’m Alerio.  You won’t mention anything about the Legion to anyone else, right?”

I shrugged.  “If Vulpes wants it secret, I won’t say anything.”

“Does he?”

I stared at Alerio, almost forgetting we were in a car and shrugged.  “I have no idea.”

He thought for one, awkward moment.  “He probably does.”

“Then I won’t tell anyone.”

Alerio drove a while longer, glancing curiously at me when we stopped briefly at traffic lights and traffic.  He seemed like he wanted to ask me questions, but he didn’t.  We stopped at the parking lot without further conversation.  

He didn’t get out or even pull into a spot, which didn’t bother me too much, I suppose.  I wanted to get back into my own clothing and hopefully meet with this “Boone” character and sic him on the old bitch who’d sold me.  Granted, my morals were far from saintly, but I was nothing if not vengeful and selling me to slavery really wasn’t something I could abide.  Not like rape or home invasion.  I had standards, few standards, but standards nonetheless, and they were crossed mainly by betrayal, murder, and the taking of freedom.  My freedom, specifically; slavery itself was all well and good, so long as I wasn’t the one in the cage.  Like I said, not the most moral man.  

Alerio drove off almost as soon as I shut the door.  His abrupt flight might have been prompted by the arrival of a very familiar sage-green Volkswagon, which pulled into the lot’s one vacant spot.  My spot, I supposed, not that I’d ever own my own car.  Arcade got out and stared at me.  Yes, I was staring at him first, but I still got the sense that he recognized me even before I awkwardly spoke, which was absolutely miraculous given how well Vulpes had disguised me.  

“Hello.”

He blinked very slowly, probably doubting his vision.  “Jack?  ...I might need new glasses...”

I chuckled.  “Hardly.  Come on, it’s been a hell of a day so far, I’m hoping that won’t last.”

I started for the stairs and he caught up with me.  “So...why are you dressed like that?  Is this a costume?”

I frowned and shook my head.  “Nope.  I—”  I paused.  I had almost explained, and I wanted to, but if Vulpes wanted some of the Legion stuff kept secret, and I didn’t know how much of it, it was better to err on the side of caution.  I couldn’t tell Arcade what had happened.  “Long story.”

I knew he was frowning at me suspiciously but didn’t acknowledge that fact.  Today had already been hellish enough, I didn’t need a discussion about why I was concealing having been briefly enslaved and then freed by my other lover who apparently held significant rank in a global terrorist and slavery organization.  

*        *        *

He was hiding something.  Jack had secrets, I’d known that from the start, but being a prostitute was a lot different from the vibe I was starting to get.  The man had still freaked out Daisy in some way.  She thought he was military, which seemed impossible, but Daisy didn’t exactly tend towards paranoia even where I was concerned.  The woman would happily talk to random strangers about being a military helicopter pilot, not that she’d go into too much detail.  It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten caught as it was, but this was different.  I’d dismissed it earlier, mostly because I hadn’t wanted to believe, but maybe she was onto something.  He wasn’t military, or at least I still strongly doubted that, but here he was almost unrecognizable in the colors of a gang that had really been causing a lot of chaos and suffering.  He did tend to disappear at all hours of the day and night and never explained where he went, he showed up with serious injuries almost all the time, although I’d seen his awful luck, and he was still definitely smart enough that he might be hiding something terrible.  And he’d seemed just a little too comfortable having that clearly homicidal journalist stay in his house overnight.  I wonder whatever had happened to that journalist.  But at the moment, Jack was just a little more concerning.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and next chapter, which will hopefully be finished much sooner than this one was, will see Vulpes, through Jack, using Boone as a means to an end. XD


	18. The Scotsman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title, as usual, is the title of a song, a fairly appropriate song for this chapter for a lot of reasons. Look it up, if you're so inclined. ;)

Maybe it was all the times that I’d been homeless, or maybe I was just too damn neat, but I could not shower quickly enough.  The clothes were fairly clean, but whatever paint or make-up Vulpes had used to render me unrecognizable had left the skin of my face feeling stiff and waxy, and that drove me almost as crazy as the gunk where my body had touched the bars of the cage and the stink of filth and sweat that still clung to me.  Even with one broken arm and one stiff and sore arm, I’d scalded and scrubbed until my whole body looked red and raw before I finally felt clean again.  I used the last of the shampoo I’d brought with me and opened the bottle I’d bought the other day to wash my hair a fifth and final time, just to be satisfied that it was clean.  

The shampoo looked awkwardly like semen.  It came in an opaque bottle, so I hadn’t known or expected that.  It smelled dramatically better and probably tasted much worse.  I tried not to dwell on what it looked like lest I take even longer in the shower.  Besides, if things went well, I’d hopefully get laid tonight (at long last).  

*       *       *

I had planned on asking Jack more directly about why he’d shown up dressed like that, but decided against it after the first hour he spent in the shower.  I wanted to trust him, even if it seemed unlikely that there could be a good reason for his disguise.  

I’d been to a few of Garrett’s parties before and knew what to expect.  They weren’t really my kind of thing, but he was a friend and I thought Jack might like it.  Thinking about it, I realized that I didn’t actually know if it was a costume party or not.  I mean, given that it was Halloween and knowing Garrett, I presumed that it was, but it might not be and for the sake of avoiding more than the inevitable level of awkwardness, I should probably ask.  I texted him.  An hour later Jack was still in the shower and I hadn’t heard back from Garrett.  Now I was starting to worry about Jack as well.  Dismissing the disguise under the probably naive hope that he’d had good reason for wearing it, almost three hours in the shower seemed ridiculous.  Part of me was beginning to worry that he’d slipped and knocked himself out, given his terrible luck, and an equal part was afraid that he felt awkward about whatever he was hiding that had necessitated such a disguise.  I mean, we weren’t likely to be late, considering Garrett had set the party for eight at night, almost unusually early considering the hours he kept and it was only six now.  We had two full hours to get ready and walk two blocks.  Provided Garrett ever got back to me about the attire.  

Knowing him, he was probably asleep, letting Francine get the party set up.  He managed the business end of things and all in all, he probably had more work than she did, but he also worked nights.  He didn’t usually wake up until at least this time of the evening; he’d probably wake up and get himself ready right before the party.  If I’d have had Francine’s number, I’d have texted her, but I didn’t.  I didn’t have almost any contacts on my phone really.  

I should have thought of this sooner, but it was too late now.  I’d have to ask Jack what he wanted to do once he was out of the shower.  We could risk going in costume, or risk wearing normal clothes, but at least we should be consistent, considering we were going together.  

*       *       *

Checking my phone once I was thoroughly clean, I realized that I’d been showering for three hours and seventeen minutes.  So much for a quick wash, but at least I couldn’t smell that awful container any longer.  I threw on a bath robe, planning to ask Arcade if I should wear a costume for the party.  

I found him in the kitchen, reading a book he must have brought with him when he moved in.  He set it down and looked up when I entered.  “So it occurs to me that Garrett never actually told me if this is a costume party or not.  And he’s not responding to my texts; he’s probably asleep.”  

I had an idea immediately, but wasn’t sure if he had something in mind or not.  “So...what do you think?”

*       *       *

Two hours later we were at the Wrangler.  I still couldn’t tell if Jack’s idea was brilliant or inane, but I was leaning towards the former.  Rather than wear an obvious costume or ordinary street clothes, he had instead suggested that we wear clothing we might possibly have worn on a normal day that could also be construed as a costume.  In my case, this meant my work clothes— the lab coat I wore when I ran blood tests and such rather than full-out scrubs.  In Jack’s case, this meant that he wore the most incredibly Scottish outfit I had ever seen.  He took so long to dress that we almost did manage to be late and I could easily see why.  

Jack, dazzlingly colorful hair tied back in a ponytail, wore a thick dark-green kilt with a belt I hadn’t expected the garment to need.  The kilt raised questions I tried not to think about and I didn’t expect to find out due to the silver sword-shaped pin and the odd Scottish belt-purse thing that held the fabric down.  Or at least I didn’t expect to find out now.  Maybe later.  As long as he wanted that and life didn’t get in the way yet again.  He had his phone and wallet in that grayish black fur whatever-it-was called (Scottish culture had never been my forte) and overall the accessory looked rather rustic even if it was clean and even though the clasp was decorated with fairly large blue gemstones.  Aside from the distracting plaid, he wore a white shirt beneath a black suede jacket that seemed just a little too big for him; I wondered if it had been his father’s.  His socks were knee-high and white with odd little plaid flags at the top that matched his kilt.  I noticed somewhat nervously that he had a small dagger tucked into one of those socks, but it seemed almost decorative, not that I thought a man who regularly got stranded in the wilderness wouldn’t be able to use it if he had to.  Rather than the sort of dress shoes I’d seen in pictures of people wearing kilts, he had simple but fancy black leather boots.  He also had a hat, the most Scottish hat I had ever seen, adding to the almost comical ethnicity of his outfit.  The hat itself was fairly plain, but he wore two truly massive feathers stuck into the rim.  Overall, Jack ended up looking like some kind of mascot for his former country.  That or the star of a very Scottish-themed porno.  Nope, that was definitely not a mental image I needed just now.  

As usual for parties, the Wrangler was packed with half the neighborhood and the vast majority of the guests were already drunk, high, or horny, or some combination of the three.  I wasn’t exactly fond of the lifestyles most of them led, but was more bothered by the crowding, and as a result I drifted over to a wall parallel to the door once I got a drink.  I don’t really know what I’d expected from Jack as the man was so constantly full of surprises, but he managed to seem even more uncomfortable with crowds than I was.  At first, he stuck so close beside me that our clothes were in constant contact and I didn’t need to turn around to know exactly where he was.  I wondered briefly if he had a fear of crowds, but once we had our drinks and I stopped walking, he started to relax.  Slowly.  Even by the time we left, he had never become fully at ease until we left the building.  

Once we had our drinks and he was no longer practically clinging to me, I found myself distracted from his apparent anxiety by the glass in his hand.  “Water?”

Jack nodded, tearing his gaze from the crowd to look up at me.  “I don’t drink alcohol.”

That seemed odd.  Figuring this was another of his traumas, I tried to lighten the mood, “Don’t let Garret hear that.”  

To my surprise, Jack not only smiled but laughed; his sobriety had nothing to do with bad memories.  I dared to ask.  “Why don’t you drink?”

Again, on the rare occasions that the man was genuinely happy, that miraculous smile sent shivers down my spine.  “Just a food sensitivity or something.  It turns my stomach.”  He was definitely happy.  For a moment I almost thought he’d relaxed completely, but then he went back into the crowd, presumably going to get a snack, and I saw that tension coming back.  He clearly dreaded navigating the drunken throng, not that I really enjoyed it myself.  

Jack no sooner left my side than Francine appeared, abruptly, nearby.  Almost the entire party wore costumes, but she just had her usual suit-like outfit.  She was watching Jack appreciatively enough that it bothered me a little, though she didn’t seem to notice.  “My brother’s description was accurate.  Damn, that is one fine piece of ass.”

I knew better than to try and stop her.  She was too like her brother, and as long as I let it go, she’d hopefully keep those thoughts to herself.  “Hello, Francine.  What’s up?”

“Well, business is booming and we’ve got some new booze and new additions to the staff, but there’ve also been some pretty creepy guys hanging around the neighborhood.”

I frowned a little, remembering the journalist who’d shown up shot in Jack’s house.  “Creepy how?”

“Like that gang the papers have been talking about.  International slavers called the Legion, or something like that.  They haven’t done anything here that I know about, but they’ve been around.  They must have some interest in the area and that worries me.  You know we’re not one hundred percent legal ourselves, but the rumors I’ve heard...let’s just say I’d rather not have to deal with this particular gang.  Anything new with you?”

“Well, the hospital’s been pretty swamped with all the disasters lately, and people keep finding bodies that are probably the Legion’s doing.  There have also been some weird heart attacks, but Jack’s the only change in my personal life.”

She gave me a look I couldn’t quite interpret.  “Jack’s the only change?”

“Well he’s quite enough trouble himself, I mean the guy can barely go a day without a hospital visit.”

Now she grinned.  “Are you sure that’s not just to see you?”

I blushed.  “I’m nowhere near that enticing.  And no, he’s already been in a car crash and he’s probably had five serious injuries since I met him.  Actually, I suspect that he got beat up by the Legion his first day here.”

“Which was all of two weeks ago?”  She held that grin like a cat with a ball of yarn, “And now you’re living with him?”  I started to answer, nearly at a loss for words, but before I could manage a reply, she added, “How is he, by the way?  Is he as good as he looks?”

Just when I thought I couldn’t blush more deeply she said _that_.  “Could we please stop talking about my sex life?  Thanks.”

Francine laughed.  “Alright.  I’m sure half the town’s been wondering...”  Catching my expression, she dropped it and pondered aloud.  “Is he really Scottish?”

I nodded.  “Yeah, but he loses his accent most of the time.”

“Is he really some kind of noble?”  Now that caught me almost as off guard as her previous line of questioning.  I stared at her blankly.  

“What?”

Francine gestured to Jack, barely visible amid the horde of drunken guests.  “Those feathers, they signify rank.  The whole outfit’s amazing quality too, it’s formal, and I’d be willing to bet the gems on that sporan are sapphires.”  

“How exactly do you know all that?”

She looked back at me and sipped her beer.  I got the sense that she was mildly surprised to know more than I did about this, but she hid that surprise pretty well.  “The guy who sells us our best Scotch likes to talk about Scottish fashion.  And he lowers his prices the longer we listen, so I could just about recite the whole outfit from memory.  This one’s formal wear, eight yard kilt and the jacket and everything.  The socks shouldn’t really be white, I guess, but there’s white stripes in that tartan, so it doesn’t clash anyway.”

“...I guess there’s a lot I could learn about Scottish fashion.”  I was tempted to ask her something else, the same question I had thought of earlier, and she would probably know the answer, but that would steer the conversation right back to my sex life.  I could just ask Jack later.  

*       *       *

I remembered the man Vulpes had mentioned, but knew I couldn’t pick him out of the crowd myself, so I gravitated towards Vero to ask if she knew him.  I found her towards the back, wearing a tight gold dress and matching headband.  It seemed to be a costume, but I didn’t know of what.  I’m pretty sure her hair was a wig covering her actual hair.  I still didn’t understand why she always seemed to hide it.  

She was chatting with Raul, who had a more convincing zombie outfit than most horror movies.  They greeted me and I waited until they finished their conversation and Raul walked off for more tequila before I asked Veronica, “You know anyone named Craig Boone?”

She frowned.  “Yeah, why?  He’s not really the friendliest guy.  I mean, he’s been through a lot, so I can see why, but still.”

“I have something to give him from a friend of mine.”

That frown intensified.  I could tell she was more than a little suspicious, but she trusted me.  I still didn’t get why people did that so readily.  “Alright.  He’s the really beefy guy over there.  The one with the red beret.”

He was also the only one not in costume in the direction she had gestured.  He stood like a mannequin against the wall, arms crossed, eyes hidden behind sunglasses he hadn’t bothered to take off even though the bar was fairly dark.  He wore camouflage shorts and a somewhat dirty white t-shirt.  “Beefy” had also been an accurate description.  I’d think he was hot if I went for that kind of military look.  Vulpes crossed more into the realm of “lethal” than “military,” and the former had been the main draw, whatever that said about my self-preservation instincts.  Arcade didn’t even seem remotely military to me.  Although he did have that pistol he carried.  

Boone gave me a look as I walked over to him and either my sexuality was obvious or I looked like I was selling something because he stated flatly, “Not interested.”

I’d had the papers folded up in my coat pocket and I took them out as I clarified.  “You’re Craig Boone, right?  I have something for you.”

His default expression seemed to be a permanent scowl, so I had no idea what he was thinking.  His only response to my clarification was a terse and guarded, “Yeah.”

I handed him the papers.  It was fairly dark, so he had to take off his sunglasses to read them.  I saw his eyes widen and then narrow and flick back towards me, paying much more careful attention to how I looked, apparently seeking a better judge of my motives.  “How did you get this?”

I’d glanced over the papers before giving them to him.  They were the documentation of a sale.  The sale of a pregnant woman.  The resonance with my dream had unnerved me at first, but now I’d accepted it.  I dreamed the future, it seemed, and sometimes the past.  At any rate, it was good to know.  Not that I could really control my dreams, or otherwise make it more useful.  I guess some precognition was better than none at all.  

I figured that he’d known the woman, she’d probably been his wife, judging from his reaction and my dream.  

“A friend of mine gave me the documents.  He rescued me earlier today when I was briefly kidnapped by a woman on the other side of the hill.  I strongly suspect that she also abducted your wife.”

He thought for a long moment, eyeing me suspiciously and then nodded.  “Thank you.”

I gave him a nod, feeling that “you’re welcome” would have suggested a greater affection than I felt for him.  Frankly, I found his sheer stoicism and the military vibe he radiated downright repellant.  I headed back to Arcade.  

*       *       *

The conversation between Francine and I had devolved into smalltalk by the time her brother tracked me down.  He’d swapped his usual suit for a slightly different one in a distinctly fifties style.  I felt like he was mimicking some specific character, but had no idea who.  As soon as he was within speaking distance, he launched into a very sexual topic of conversation.  I guess I should be grateful that he hadn’t greeted me more flirtatiously, given that he was already slightly drunk— not that I wasn’t a bit tipsy myself.  If we’d still been dating, he’d have probably slapped my ass; it was his standard way of greeting lovers when drunk.  

“Hey, Arcade, doesn’t Jack look a lot like that bald pilot you dated a while back?  The one who was hung like a horse?”

Yet again, I found myself blushing.  “Yeah...turns out that was his uncle.  What a lovely topic to launch into, James.”

He ignored my sarcasm and slapped an arm over my shoulders.  Yup, he was defiantly pretty drunk.  At least this was good drunk.  He was usually in a good mood when he was drunk.  I’d seen him drunk and miserable; it was a nightmare.  “You lucky dog!  Does that kind of size run in the family?  Does he have a brother?  Maybe a cousin?”

At my expression, he dropped that line of questioning and laughed.  “Did the uncle introduce you?”

“You know, maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t actively seek out the younger relatives of ex-boyfriends.”

Both Garretts chuckled.  “You should, if they end up being _that_ hot.”

Francine had spoken and James suggested.  “You know, if you ever get them together for a threesome, I’d _happily_ make that a foursome.  Hell, I might be able to round up Santiago and Old Ben, if we really want to go all out.”

Now I didn’t know if he was being serious or messing with me.  I sighed and rubbed my temples.  “No thanks.”

They both laughed.  I caught sight of Jack, weaving his way back through the crowd and prayed they’d change the subject.  They did.  He was no sooner within earshot, than Francine, getting straight to business, gestured to his hat and asked.  “Do those feathers show some kind of status?”  Knowing her, she was probably looking for something to tell her scotch-dealing friend to get a better price.

Jack gave her an odd look.  This wasn’t one of his traumas, but he seemed almost unsure how to answer.  He explained, “Well, kind of.  Technically, I’m the chief of a cadet branch of the MacLean Clan, not that clan chiefs really do anything anymore.  The title’s only mine because so many of my relatives are female and...well, I’m not on great terms with my family, so I’m not really sure where that leaves my rank.”  Talking about it brought out his accent and the end of that statement was barely decipherable, but the awkward way he trailed off showed it to be a sensitive topic.  I doubt James, at least, understood him, but he heard enough of the emotion that he didn’t ask.  

An awkward silence settled over us for a moment and just when I thought one of the Garretts was going to change the subject, a very drunk man wandered over and dragged James into a conversation.  Francine had the decency to say a quick goodbye as she hurried off to check on the guy they had tending bar so that they could mingle.  That left me alone with Jack.  

Or at least as alone as possible in the loud and crowded room.  He leaned back against the wall, his smile gone.  He seemed to be dwelling on another dark memory.  

I tried to lighten the mood.  “So, Descartes walks into a bar, the bartender asks if he wants his usual, Descartes replies, `I think not’, and he vanishes.”  Jack burst out laughing.  I could still see the sadness in his eyes, but it was fading now, and I hoped he’d stay happy the rest of the night.  Well, I hoped he’d stay happy forever, but that was a truly quixotic hope.  Tonight, at least, might be possible.  

*       *       *

He really did like philosophy, didn’t he?  And he was trying to cheer me up.  Even if I hadn’t been smiling from the joke, that would have made me grin.  Even a week ago, I hadn’t been able to imagine ever getting over Ven, but now I think I had almost managed it.  Arcade was a great guy.  I mean, so was Vulpes, Vulpes just seemed a lot more likely to kill me at a moment’s notice.  I felt like I could trust Arcade completely.  He was...safe.  

We chatted a while, mostly about philosophy.  I don’t really know how long we talked, but I think we went through a few drinks each and I could tell he was starting to get drunk by the time I finished my third glass of water and went to get more as well as some food.  

*       *       *

At that point, Jack dared to leave the wall again and meandered carefully back to the buffet.  The crowds still seemed to bother him, even if he had relaxed immensely while talking to me.  He kept flinching away when people got too close.  He was definitely eccentric.  Gorgeous, intelligent, creative,interested in philosophy, and damn sexy, but also eccentric.  And probably a prostitute or something along those lines.  The curiosity was driving me almost as crazy as the fact that I couldn’t seem to get him out of whatever situation he was in.  I was sure it had to be bad if he wouldn’t talk about it.  He’d been homeless, was probably a runaway, and he had way too much money for someone his age to have and not explain.  My instincts told me runaway prostitute, but somehow that didn’t quite fit and I still couldn’t get to the bottom of the man.  

My thoughts reinterpreted that statement in a way that made me blush.  No, brain, stop that.  The alcohol must be getting to me, I figured.  I’d had, what...two...no, three...or maybe five glasses?  I guess Jack had me distracted; I was usually much better at keeping track of that.  Okay, it was probably time to stop drinking now.  

“Wondering what’s under that skirt?”

I turned to stare at the woman who had appeared beside me.  She was dressed as a cowgirl and nursing a nearly empty bottle of whiskey.  From the look of her, it probably wasn’t her first in the night, or even the past ten minutes.  

“What?”

She nodded across the dance floor at Jack, who was starting to work his way back through the crowd with a refilled glass and a slice of pizza that he finished before he actually got back.  “Heard scotsmen don’t wear anything underneath.  Got half a mind to check, as he’s a real scotsman and all.  Seemed a funny costume, if you ask me, dressing up as something you already are...”

I raised an eyebrow and looked back at her, trying not to think about the possibility that Jack might not have anything underneath that kilt.  “You realize that I’m actually a doctor, right?”

Before she could answer, Jack reached us and introduced Cass and I.  

Cass frowned.  “You boys always dress in costume as yourselves?”

I started to explain, but Jack apparently had a response at the ready.  “We thought this was a good choice as we didn’t know if it was a costume party or not.  Besides, this way I get to see him in that pretty lab coat.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “`Pretty’ is not the first descriptor I’d expect for a lab coat.”

Jack grinned slyly, “It _is_ pretty.  And sexy.”  He kissed me briefly, catching me completely off-guard.  Jack stepped closer to me and turned towards Cass as my surprise dissipated.  He stood so close beside me that we were almost touching, making it pretty clear that we were together.  That seemed to explain his behavior.  Cass was clearly attracted to him, maybe this was his way of saying he was taken.  

Cass muttered something and shook her head, walking away.  I waited until she was out of earshot.  “Did you do that just to get rid of her?”

Jack laughed.  “Of course not, I have other ways I could have gotten rid of her.”  He gave me a look that made me shiver.  Damn.  He was so awkward so much of the time, and then he suddenly became this smooth?  How did he _do_ that?

“You should be careful, that kind of look might make her come back.”

“It wasn’t directed at her.”  This time, I expected the kiss.  

We kept even that kiss fairly chaste.  There were more than a few people making out around the room and I wouldn’t be surprised if several couples had either gone upstairs or slipped into the bathrooms to get more intimate, but I’d never felt comfortable with getting to the point of making out in public even when I didn’t expect people to care.  

I glimpsed a strange man staring at us when I broke the kiss, but he looked away quickly enough that I didn’t think much of it.  He was probably just homophobic.  

*       *       *

“Do you have some kind of special interest in lab coats or something?”

The question caught me a little off-guard, but I answered honestly enough.  I was glad my attempt to flirt had turned out so well, I had a habit of playing out social encounters in my mind and for a change I’d been able to try out the lines I’d come up with in real life.  I guess I really could write smooth characters very well.  

“Well, I do find them quite flattering on you, but I admit that I have something of a...a fetish for scientists and doctors.  Lab coats kind of come with the territory.”  Now I was blushing.  So much for smooth.  

He chuckled and wrapped an arm around me, half-hugging me.  I could tell he felt a little awkward, realizing that I had a doctor fetish, and recognizing that that probably played into my attraction to him, so I added, “That did add to my attraction to you, but it’s not like I’m only with you because you’re a doctor.”  I held the hand that was wrapped around my waist and snuggled against him a little, relieved when I felt him relax.  

We were silent for a while until he asked softly.  “Francine knows a bit about Scottish fashion.  You know you could have probably just worn the kilt and people would have thought you were in costume, right?  You didn’t have to get dressed to the nines.”

I shrugged.  “I felt like it.”  I paused, but saw how curious he looked, so I added, “I’m used to dressing like this.  I like how traditional it is and it reminds me of home in a good way, although I should traditionally wear the kilt a bit higher.  It shouldn’t touch my socks, but it’s more comfortable this way.  My mother would be having a fit.”  

*       *       *

He paused, looked down and added under his breath, “Not that she wouldn’t be having a fit about a lot of things, if she saw me now.”  The bitterness in his voice was almost as biting as the sorrow.  There was a lot of pain there, but I didn’t want to talk him through it today.  It seemed to have worked before, so that was the strategy I’d decided on.  I’d talk Jack through his problems and hopefully he’d eventually recover.  I knew a lot about bad memories myself, but he seemed to out do even my dark past.  Half my age and already so...broken.  No, not broken.  I could see when he smiled just how miraculously alive he was.  Somehow he held on to that spirit despite everything he’d been through.  Maybe if I helped him, he could be like that more often.  

What little I knew of him suggested that his mother might have good reason to be upset with him, but I didn’t want to make that assumption against Jack.  I squeezed the hand he was still holding.  “She isn’t here, Jack.  It’s alright.”

He relaxed and even squeezed back, but let go and stepped out from under my arm.  “Yeah.  I’ll be back in a few minutes, alright?”  He seemed fine, and I wanted to believe that as he disappeared into the crowd, but I also had the sneaking suspicion that an ordinary man would be going off to drink.  Was he really okay?

*       *       *

I wasn’t really okay.  Thinking about my mother had been a mistake, we’d been very close and everything that had happened between me and her hurt more than I wanted to admit.  

It was mostly the memories bothering me, but it didn’t help that Americans seemed to think that men in kilts were more feminine or something, not to mention all the people I’d overheard calling it a skirt.  I knew they didn’t mean it as an insult or I’d have probably punched them.  I liked fights just a _little_ too much for my own good.  

But right now my mood was less aggressive and more depressive.  Jeez, if I didn’t calm myself down I’d probably start crying.  If this had been a party with my family, now would have been the point when I retreated to my room to hide and hoped that no one noticed my absence, and had this been a college party, I would have slipped out or talked Ven into leaving.  As it was, I liked the people here, even Cass, whose outrageous behavior usually seemed more amusing than annoying to me.  Heck, even Boone was interesting in how different he was.  I’d never liked crowds and I’d never liked drunks, but this place was new to me, and that made me like it, and the people in it.  I truly hadn’t encountered anyone I disliked aside from Robert House.  

I went into the bathroom, mostly to calm down but partly to piss.  I wasn’t to the point of having a panic attack or even actually crying yet, but I didn’t feel comfortable around people until I was sure that I could handle the emotion.  I’d had problems in public before, everything from breaking down in tears to tensing up and having flashbacks, and I hated it.  I knew I had never been the most competent man on my own, but I hardly liked to advertise that fact, and nothing made people treat me like a child more quickly than seeing me emotionally compromised.  I pushed the feelings to the back of my mind and struggled to focus on where I was.  It was a technique for dealing with panic attacks, which I didn’t expect to have now, but I’d been surprised before and it still helped to calm me down.  

The room was a little small.  It had black tiles and fixtures with red and silver details.  Stainless steel knobs and faucets on the sinks.  There was a crack in the mirror and a poster of a scantily clad woman on one wall.  The sink felt cold against my palms and the room was just a little chilly.  I smelled sweat and half a dozen things I refused to identify and I could hear at least one couple going at it in the stalls.  

Now that successfully distracted me.  My libido trumped my many traumas.  The party was all well and good, but I had Arcade and a gigantic sex drive.  There was a lot we could do that would surely cheer me up as long as he was willing to leave a bit early.  Besides, at least if I broke down around him, I’d be okay with it.  He’d already seen me at my worst.  Or close to it.  I could almost believe that he understood everything I’d been through.  I mean, I knew it was possible, but it was unlikely.  As long as he accepted me as I was, I don’t know how much I cared if he understood it all.  

I ran some water on my hands to slick back the few hairs that kept falling into my face and headed back to the party.  No one had gone in or out of the bathroom while I’d been inside, but as I left I nearly collided with a familiar little man who looked as annoyed as he had the last time I’d seen him.  I remembered that Vulpes knew him, but couldn’t recall his full name.  Cato something.  I nodded amiably but felt awkward greeting him as he appeared to be heading into the bathroom.  He nodded back sternly, also silent, but didn’t go through the door.  There was nothing else back here and he just lurked tensely at the end of the hallway as I headed back to the crowd.  That was creepy.  

Cato’s eccentricity so distracted me that I kept watching him as I walked and ultimately collided with Cassidy.  

Unlike myself, she _had_ anticipated the collision and prepared for it.  By now she was so drunk that the smell of her breath almost made me sick.  I would have held my breath in disgust if I didn’t do so in shock at what she had just done.  

Realizing that I’d been about to run into her, she’d reached forward and stepped slightly back, meaning that my stride brought my crotch firmly into her grip.  Walking had shifted my sporan enough that she could easily slip her hand under it, and as a result she had a fairly direct feel of my package beneath the wool of my kilt and the boxers I’d worn just incase wind or audacity lifted my kilt at some point tonight.  But I hadn’t expected such a blatant groping and found myself completely at a loss for how to react.  

From that contact alone, I became fairly distracted just trying not to get a boner and I’m pretty sure she could feel that.  The woman wasn’t satisfied with just making me uncomfortable, however, she had questions to answer.  She found my base and ran her fingers down the entire length of my shaft, following it through the fabric and letting out a soft whistle when she reached my tip.  Part of me felt I’d be justified to slap her and I might have eagerly done so if I hadn’t wanted to stay on good terms with everyone here.  My tone was still very formal when I found my voice and spoke— I often sounded very polite when I expected to start a fight.  

“Madame, kindly unhand me.”

Cass kept her hand where it was, but looked stunned by my tone.  She smiled, “Damn, well-hung and so polite too!  I will, just cause you asked so nicely.  You ever decide to swing both ways, just let me know...”  She gave my crotch one last stroke and let me go, walking back into the crowd with a sashay to her hips that I suspect was meant to entice me.  This was hardly the first issue I’d had with women being overly pushy and I didn’t really mind as long as she kept her hands to herself.  

Her sashay did nothing for me, but I couldn’t exactly control my body when my cock got that kind of attention, even from a woman.  It didn’t help that the airflow of the kilt turned me on a little to begin with.  I mean, I wasn’t some kind of robot and my self control had never been the best.  At least my sporan was heavy enough to mostly conceal the tell-tale bulge against the fabric of my kilt.  I folded my hands over it just in case and sought out Arcade, hoping to convince him to go home a bit early so we might be able to put this to good use.  

*       *       *

I saw Jack walking back towards me after only a few minutes.  He looked alright, and he even had a slight smile but it didn’t reach his eyes.  But he didn’t look sad.  Actually, Jack looked vaguely confused, or maybe disturbed, but when he reached me, that smile became genuine and then took on an unmistakably flirtatious tone.  He hooked one arm around my own, letting his fingers rest lightly against my wrist.  I think he would have held my hand, except I had my hands in my pockets.  

By this point, I was fairly drunk and that clearly seductive gleam in Jack’s dazzling eyes was more than a little distracting, but I guess all my years of practice made me notice that something was odd about my surroundings.  I got that little note of fear in the back of my mind and tore my gaze from Jack to look around.  Having had to live so carefully for almost as long as I could remember, I noticed the first red flag right away.  

There was a guy almost as young as Jack, maybe even younger, watching us from the room’s upstairs balcony.  He could almost pass for a guest except he wasn’t talking to anyone and he wore red and black street clothes rather then a costume.  He also wasn’t drinking, and that stare seemed much too intense to be harmless.  That guy seemed to be the least experienced, I realized as I slowly noticed another three men in similar clothes, also paying more attention to Jack than even his gorgeous body warranted.  I mean, I know I could sometimes be a little...jealous, but this seemed more serious than people just checking him out.  Aside from the man on the balcony, all of them were talking and drinking like the other guests, and some of the men even looked familiar to me, but they always kept Jack in sight, even relocating if someone blocked their view.  And they all had nearly identical outfits in red and black; the colors the Legion wore, from what I remembered.  I was just creeped out enough to think about finding Garrett to say we were leaving when I noticed another man more expertly hidden than the ones I’d already seen.  He chatted with Cliff and Gibson a short distance away and his red and black outfit even looked like it _might_ be a costume.  The hint of a frown never left his expression, even though his tone was pretty jovial and I was close enough to notice two details about him that seriously disturbed me.  For one, even while he spoke to Gibson and Cliff, his eyes kept flicking between them, watching Jack and myself.  Managing to be even more unsettling than that were the bulges of a blade and gun holstered on either side of his hips, almost completely hidden by his loose outfit.  I guessed a machete and some kind of small pistol.  

I had no idea what they might be planning and didn’t care to find out.  I had my gun on me, as always, and even with five of them we probably would have been fine if they tried something, but I’d rather not make that bet.  If Garret even noticed we were gone, I could always text him an explanation, besides, Jack seemed eager to leave already, though the reality of the situation left me somewhat less interested in sex, even with Jack.  Getting back to his semi-secure house where he owned a large, reasonably intimidating German Shepard seemed a lot more immediately appealing.  

I tried not to take my eyes off the men, but still glanced at Jack briefly and found him frowning up at me.  He must have picked up on my trepidation but not realized the cause.  I didn’t explain yet.  I watched the men.  Praying that the last one I had noticed must be their leader, I waited until a wildly drunk couple pushed past him on their way upstairs, momentarily blocking his view and nudged Jack towards the door.  He took the hint.  

We were outside within a second and I glanced back, fully expecting the men to follow us.  They didn’t.  

The Wrangler happened to be on the same street that went up towards Coit Tower and became the stairs, so even once sidewalk became steps, we weren’t necessarily out of sight, although it was dark and the foliage further obscured our figures.  

Neither of us ran so as not to attract attention, at least in my case, but Jack walked very fast uphill.  As before, he would race ahead to a good stopping point and then pause, always staying just within earshot and looking back down the street while he waited for me to catch up.  It was quiet up here, both at this time in the late evening and because of the neighborhood, so he could apparently hear me from a great distance.  I could handle the climb, but it was steep, so I fell silent for a while, out of breath and temporarily at a loss for conversation.  Well, not quite at a loss.  I still had to explain what had happened, but I tried not to consider that right now, given how deserted the stairs were at this time of night.  My mind drifted back to Cass’s first question and I found myself watching the swaying curtain of green plaid around Jack’s legs.  It reached just past his knees, so even uphill, I never could tell— not that I was making a conscious effort to see directly.  I was trying to guess from the outside, the way he moved and how he wore it.  I mean, I was a doctor, for heaven’s sake, I should be able to see if...something...was holding his package in place.  Climbing the stairs, his kilt fluttered about, but I couldn’t be sure one way or another.  He’d kept one hand down to keep it against his legs when he’d edged between dancers at the party, and he did seem a bit more...nervous than usual tonight...  Maybe he was going commando.  Then again, maybe he just didn’t want to show off his underwear, which was understandable.  

I’d never expected to date a man in a kilt.  With all the other questions Jack raised, that brought the least common.  Or one of the least common.  The man raised a lot of questions about himself.  

Despite this line of thought and despite the fact that we saw no further sign of the men, I was still uneasy when we got back to Jack’s house.  It didn’t help that the upstairs lights were off, although I swore they’d been on last I’d seen them.  This included the light on the upstairs porch, which we still hadn’t managed to reach.  

Jack didn’t ask what had prompted my sudden decision to leave until I’d locked and dead-bolted the front door and he’d made us tea.  We sat on the couch and he finally raised the question.  

*       *       *

He must have been fairly shaken, I knew he was still pretty drunk, but he almost seemed sober from all the adrenaline in his system.  His reaction to fear was apparently the same kind of calm focus my mother got in crises, I just hadn’t really noticed this before.  It seemed both disturbing and comforting that he sometimes reminded me of her.  Arcade took a sip of his tea before he explained that there’d been guys watching me.  Armed guys.  He described them.  

*       *       *

He frowned a bit when I described the man who had seemed to be in charge.  “Oh.  His name’s Cato.  He’s a friend of that journalist.”

Okay, his calm and casual notice of this was a little disturbing, I admit.  Was he somehow involved with the Legion and just leading me on?  I shook off the suspicion.  No.  Why would he?  He had nothing to gain from that.  

“I’d be careful about that journalist as well.  We still don’t know who shot him or how he got in here.  Or where he went when he left.”  The porch light came to mind and I felt myself shiver at the idea that that creepy journalist might at the very least be able to get in here whenever he wanted.  I really hoped that I’d never see him again.  

Frustratingly enough, Jack shrugged and seemed to dismiss the warning.  “I know.  I’ll be careful.”  He lapsed into silence and looked up, catching my mild annoyance.  He leaned back by my side, snuggling against me gently and pulling my arm over his shoulder.  “Thank you.  I didn’t notice the men at the party, I only saw Cato for a second and he was acting a little odd, but I didn’t think much of it.  I have no street sense, I guess I’m just used to danger.  Sorry.”  

I sighed.  Every time he seemed inexcusably childish, he said something like that and I couldn’t help but find him adorable.  I let the arm over his shoulder hug him against my side and he rested his head on my shoulder in response.  At this point, I just wanted to relax and calm down after that scare.  

Unable to sit still, as always, Jack soon turned on the TV.  This late on Halloween night, there wasn’t much on aside from horror movies and similarly unrelaxing shows, so we ultimately settled on the Rocky Horror Picture show.  Early in the movie, we ended up holding hands and around halfway through, he looked up and kissed me.  By this point I’d calmed down, and I responded in kind.  

*       *       *

For once the smell of alcohol managed not to turn my stomach.  It had a strange appeal, I had to admit, at least when combined with that barely detectable smell the doctor had, the hormonal fragrance below the ever-present hospital smells and disinfectant, that rich, intoxicating musk that spoke to some primal part of me.  Spoke loudly, it seemed, or else I was just influenced by Arcade’s lips, which had just started kissing their way down the side of my neck.  I felt myself getting hard again, even though my sporan kept it hidden.  Admittedly, I had the self control of a rabid drug-addict, which is to say none what-so-ever.  Hell, I got hard if I thought about carrots at the wrong time of day, the only part about this situation that should surprise me was how tired I was after this horrible afternoon.  

I wondered exactly what he was planning.  I hadn’t really been on the receiving end of oral before, and given the path of his lips, I started to suspect that’s where this was going.  I felt just a little nervous, realizing that I might actually have sex with him tonight.  

Arcade seemed completely oblivious to my thoughts or my trepidation.  I was pretty sure I knew where he was going.  It was a situation I had written about more times than I could count and he seemed to answer my unspoken question when his right hand slid down my chest and belly to tug at the thick leather of my belt strap.  Yup, that was where this was going.  My heart pounded in my chest like a caged and frenzied tiger.  I had no idea if it was anticipation and arousal or nerves, because I had never actually done this before.  Let’s hope that this was something as easily said as done, because clearly I must have some skill at writing it.  I hadn’t exactly gotten a critique or advice from Vulpes, and he was really my only former experience, aside from the abbreviated attempts I’d had with Arcade.  

By now those lips had moved down to the hair-tangled silver chain around the base of my neck, the necklace I never took off.  He traced the lines of my collarbone with his tongue.  His breath was so warm.  Had I ever thought to describe that in my writing?  I shuddered and nuzzled the side of his head, gently biting the top of his ear as he unbuckled my belt.  I brought my hands up to grip his shoulders.  God, he was muscular, more muscular than he looked.  I could feel his shoulders shifting under the fabric of his white shirt as I lay back on the couch and moved him to follow.  

Apparently bored with my collarbone, he left my belt as it was and started unbuttoning my shirt, pulling it off as he went and kissing a trail down my chest.  My own chest distracted me.  I had always been the skinny kid and the past seven years had been more focused on my emotions than my body.  Had I really become that muscular without meaning to?  Arcade glanced up at me and I looked back into those jade green eyes, lost in uncertainty.  What was this?  Was this a one night stand, no more than the product of lust and booze?  Was this what they called friends with benefits?  Was it a thought-out result of a few dates, the initiative of a man who had carefully planned his advances and was taking a leap of faith on me?  Exactly how much did we care for each other, anyway?  I still had yet to sort out my exact feelings.  Was this love?  That was me being an idealistic idiot, of course it wasn’t love.  Love probably didn’t exist.  But even so, what did this mean?  Was it simple pleasure, just some fun to pass the time, or was it some promise that he would hold me to at a later date?  What did this mean to him?  What did this mean to me? 

The answer to the latter eluded me, and, as Arcade pulled my shirt from my arms and slid a hand under the leather pouch on my kilt, I found that I no longer cared what it meant.  I moaned before I could stop myself.  With my libido, I was more than used to masturbation, but everything felt so electric when someone else was doing the touching.  I guess my moan surprised him.  He had been kissing my lower belly, letting his tongue and lips trace the lines of my abs, but now he looked up, one eyebrow quirked and a devilish grin on those lips.  He was still very drunk, and I could still see that hint of deep sadness in his eyes, but damn he could look like a sexy genius.  “I was starting to think I was just doing this for my own amusement.”  Joking, clearly.  But it raised a question I knew he wanted me to answer even if he wouldn’t say it.  That was about the only time I was ever perceptive about other people’s emotions, when they wanted me to explain something I didn’t want to explain.  I’d certainly had enough experience with that situation.  I sighed and lay back, although I had been intending to do something before he got too far along.  

“I...I’m used to having to be silent.”  When one lived with one’s parents or in a dorm with very conservative roommates, one did not masturbate loudly.  It had also become somewhat of a hobby of mine to plot and fantasize about covert sex.  I often wrote about such trysts.  

Arcade seemed both disturbed and puzzled by the statement, which I didn’t care to discuss further, lest we lose the mood.  He seemed to pick up on that or feel the same way, because he refocused on my crotch with a shrug.  He slid the carved black leather of my belt back through the silver eagle-shaped buckle and slipped it free from the belt loops on my kilt.  I was lazy with sporans, so the way I attached mine, it fell off as well.  Arcade let both drop to the floor and stared at the flat and fly-less apron* of the kilt, momentarily befuddled by the uncommon garment.  I grinned and started to help him, reaching for the buckle at the side.  He caught my hand, a mischievous smirk creeping onto his face as he looked up to meet my gaze.  I returned that smile with a slightly raised eyebrow.  “What are you up to?”

He flicked up the hem of my kilt and ducked his head underneath, letting the tartan cover him to the base of his neck and dropping onto his elbows.  The pose left his right arm in my kilt so that his fingers almost reached my balls; his left arm hugged my knee to his chest and the leg he was holding ran back between his own knees.  He was kneeling somewhat awkwardly with his feet over the arm of the couch despite his chest resting on my leg.  His weigh was probably mostly on his forearms and knees; that could not be comfortable.  In a little bit, I planned to change that.  For now, I let my left leg curl up, giving him more room between my thighs and more light under my kilt, but keeping the knee low so that the fabric wouldn’t slide off his head.  I don’t think he realized how much that turned me on.  I wanted to see his face, and under other circumstances, I would have hated having him hide like this, but my kilt was my tartan.  I didn’t tend to go for power plays, but I did go for romance, and scottish wedding tradition had brides being draped in the tartan of the groom.  The connotations of ownership were by no means problematic either, even though I tried not to be as much of a dom as I’d sometimes like to be.  

*       *       *

That answered that question.  I stared at the arousingly tight gray boxers just in front of me, grinning at the erection I could already see within.  I had half expected to find it exposed under his kilt, but it seemed that the rumor that scots didn’t wear underwear was false, at least in this case.  And he had been enjoying what I’d been doing.  Good.  

“Salve, dulce tecte bradium.” {Hello, sweet, locked-up treasure**}  

Jack seemed amused, “Do you always address cocks in Latin?”

“Only yours.”

He laughed and stretched his leg beneath me, raising the foot to brush my crotch.  I thought it was accidental as he replied, “Does my cock speak Latin?”

I slid one hand up the back of his thigh to squeeze his rear as I replied, “They don’t speak, that’s why they never tell.”

*       *       *

I chuckled at that remark, “So what happens under the kilt stays under the kilt?”  That was good, I should use that line in my next book.  I hadn’t thrown in any scotsmen yet.  The hand on my ass was making me want him even more and I groaned again before I could stop myself when he shifted his other hand forward to cup my balls.  I could feel the heat of his breath through my boxers, but he didn’t seem to be moving either hand to actually take them off me or free my cock.  The man just kept me guessing.  I didn’t really speak Latin, so I had no idea what he’d said earlier and I was starting to think that the alcohol had granted him such confidence in his already dazzling grasp of language that it managed to exceed his abilities.  For all I knew the Latin had been unintelligible, but he sounded so damn seductive that it turned me on anyway.  Latin come-ons; there’s a fetish I had never expected to have.  

*       *        *

The foot that had brushed my crotch now rubbed against it, the muscles tense and shifting all along the leg beneath me to carefully control the movement.  So that had been intentional.  I’d really only thought as far ahead as to suck him off, but it seemed like Jack wanted to reciprocate as much as he could, given the position.  Actually, it reminded me of something I’d read in an erotic novel, now that I thought about it.  One of those Jack Valentine books.  The box I’d found under Jack’s bed came to mind and I wondered if that was where he’d gotten the idea.  Another idea from those novels struck me.  If it could actually be done, it was perfect for this situation.  And the only way to know if it was possible, I supposed with a grin, was to try it.  

*       *       *

I couldn’t feel him too clearly through his pants, considering that I was feeling through the back of a foot still clothed in a thick sock, but I don’t think he was flaccid when I started rubbing his crotch.  He wasn’t completely hard until after I started, and I nearly stopped caring if he was enjoying this when I felt the tip of his tongue run along the outside of my boxers.  My breath came out in a shuddering gasp.  I knew that move.  Was he a Jack Valentine fan?  Was he going to— 

Yup.  His chin followed his tongue along my hard shaft.  My cock twitched involuntarily at the stimulation.  I felt his teeth nip the waistband of my boxers, plucking it from my skin and pulling it down just enough that it rested against the base of my shaft.  He slid his tongue between the fabric and the skin, pressing it flat and warm against my member.  I shuddered at the sensation, my foot quivering against his package.  He was definitely hard now and I wanted to tend to that, but I could do so later.  The hand on my rear clawed at the gray cloth under my kilt and pulled my boxers lower, inch by inch, letting his mouth do as much as possible.  I slid my own hand down to follow, interlocking our fingers through the wool of my kilt.  

Arcade’s tongue slid around my shaft, flicked against my balls, and then pressed between them and my erection.  He turned his head to the side and I felt his lips grip and suck at the top of my shaft, easing it free of the last few inches of cotton and elastic.  I moaned, resisting the urge to thrust, but ceasing my silence and surrendering to my desires.  I barely kept moving my foot against the bulge beyond his fly.  

*       *       *

This would have been easier in the book.  Jack, the writer, had a wonderful way of describing only the right parts and leaving the rest up to the reader’s imagination, which was probably why he was so successful, but the character who had been stripped by his lover’s mouth had, at least by my recollection, been rather average in size, and described as such.  Pulling at the cotton, I found that I had forgotten exactly how well-endowed Jack was.  Not that I minded in the least, the only annoyance was that it took longer to get at him because of his length.  He was about as wide as I was, but at least nine inches long when I finally got him free.  Maybe ten.  No wonder he was a prostitute.  I’d never had anyone that big, and maybe it was how much I’d had to drink making me overconfident, but I knew I could handle it.  It was a good thing that I’d gotten so good at this.  

*        *       *

Silence was completely out of the question.  Once he slid me into his mouth, every breath was a moan of ecstasy whether I tried to stay quiet or not.  He somehow managed to take me in all the way to the base of my shaft.  His throat was amazing, infinitely better than anything I had imagined in any of my prolific fantasies.  The fantasies that earned me my wealth did not compare to the reality in the least, how ignorant I had been and how much better would actual, wonderful experience make me?  I couldn’t believe that he could take me all the way in comfortably and yet feel so tight and hot.  His throat was so wonderfully wet and I was just thin enough that he could slip the tip of his tongue out to spread that sweltry wetness to my balls.  With my self control, I went to great lengths to avoid seeing other men naked except in porn, but even so, I had the sense that I might be difficult to handle, particularly orally.  It still took everything I had not to thrust.  

A feverish tightness throbbed in my abs and balls.  Less than a minute since he took me into his mouth and I was already close.  He was sucking at me so hard that I felt as if he would have drawn the cum from my balls even if I hadn’t been hard.  But I wanted to do more, I wanted to reciprocate, to give him the same elation that he was giving me, and I’d prefer if I could do that partly through the use of my own erection.  I don’t know where I found the willpower to hold myself back at all, but I managed not to come right then.  I propped myself up on my elbows and strained to form a sentence.  My brain was all libido and bliss.  I forgot my attempts to rub him with my foot in the blinding struggle of self-control against the immanent orgasm.  

Arcade pulled the boxers further out of the way.  One hand slid along my inner thigh and the other held my balls as one finger traced a path down along my taint.  Nope, my unexpectedly successful effort to hold out was not going to work.  His finger only had to brush my sensitive entrance and the tension that had been building in my body snapped.  

I felt like I’d never come quite as much as I did then.  My cock seemed to spasmodically gush seed for hours while I caught my breath in dazed euphoria, but it was really a few minutes at most.  My ears were ringing and I could hear the blood pounding through my body.  It took me much longer than it should have to notice when Arcade emerged from my kilt and stretched out on the couch.  He lay on his stomach, arms folded over my hips and beneath his chin.  He let his long legs hang awkwardly off the arm of the sofa, his socks almost touching the wall.  

When I returned to some level of awareness, I looked down to meet his gaze.  He’d moved a bit closer to me, so my feet were no longer beneath his crotch, but I could feel that he was still mostly hard against my right shin.  His face was tilted slightly, half watching the TV.  Eddie had just been killed.  I could hardly believe how little time had passed.  That had all been so intense that it seemed like it must have taken hours, and yet the movie was still going.  Or maybe it had just restarted.  

*       *       *

The downside of alcohol, I supposed, in addition to the loss of inhibitions, the overconfidence, and the mental impairment, was that, at least in my case, it tended to make one sleepy.  Granted, it was nearly midnight, but I had still expected to be able to “go at it” for at least the full length of the movie.  Sleep did not come easily to me at any hour, and midnight, in particular, was early, given my work schedule, but somehow I could have dozed off right then.  I didn’t normally fall asleep after sex and there was no way I was going to let Jack think that I did, so I struggled against the exhaustion and stared at the TV in the hopes that the glow might help me stay awake.  Nope.  Not helpful.  Either I was too tired from not sleeping well last night, plus the wine, or the dark colors of the movie weren’t sufficiently bright to make my brain think it was day.  My leaden eyelids kept slipping lower and lower and as the movie dragged on and Jack lay fairly still, every minute soon became a struggle to keep them open.  

In my curious glances up at Jack, I saw him alternate between watching the movie and staring thoughtfully down at me.  The latter drove me to wonder what he might be thinking and I was just about to ask when, in a burst of movement the likes of which I had never before seen from the young man, Jack inverted our positions.  He flipped me onto my back, pulling my legs forward so that I was straddling him.  One hand unbuckled my belt and had me stripped from the waist down in another fraction of a second.  He had to be a prostitute with that kind of speed and I had no chance to react until he paused on top of me.  

He’d never actually pulled his boxers back up and he’d somehow hitched the front of his kilt into the waist of the garment, leaving his erection plainly obvious.  Between that and his seductive, if slightly uncertain grin, it was pretty obvious what he had planned and I guessed that he must have stopped to let me refuse, if I wanted to.  Why the heck did he think I’d refuse?  I almost said something along those lines when he suddenly continued.  He had just a hint of hesitation as he gripped my knees and slid into me.  Anyone else, I would have wondered if they’d never done this before, but he was a prostitute, or at least it still seemed to be the most likely reason for his secrecy, money, and very sexual interests.  He must have done this before...right?  

Maybe it was just the angle.  I realized that all our previous attempts had involved one or both of us being sleep-deprived, drugged, or otherwise impaired.  Even as drunk as I was, maybe I was more coherent than I had been before, maybe I just hadn’t noticed his oddly hesitant style?  He got more confident within seconds and I dismissed the whole thing.  

*       *       *

It was a very good thing that I’d gotten some practice holding myself back with that previous session.  Just being inside him got me close in seconds and I still don’t know how I managed to last as long as I did.  I felt terribly awkward with how little experience I had initiating and more or less controlling sex, but I must have managed alright because somehow he came even before I did and seemed more than satisfied.  The gleam in his sea-green eyes almost made me think he might be impressed with me.  There was no way.  This was the first time I’d even had sex in this manner and the more I got to know him, the more I got the sense that he was very experienced.  Heck, he’d dated Garret and that man must be at least as perverted as I was.  Then again, I seemed fairly big.  Maybe my size alone had been enough, because my technique couldn’t possibly have been that amazing.  I mean, I only wrote this stuff, right?

But damn, that had been good.  I felt absolutely content, maybe even a little proud of how well I seemed to have done.  

*       *       *

Jack lay against my legs, spent and absolutely relaxed.  

“You learned a lot from Jack Valentine,” I observed, grinning sleepily.  

“Jack Valentine learned a lot from you.”  The meaning of that statement completely evaded me.  I looked down at him, my groggy mind slowly trying to piece it together.  

“I don’t think I ever met Jack Valentine...”

He smiled coyly and raised a hand to wave up at me.  

I stared at him, dumbfounded.  There was no way.  “You’re Jack Valentine?”

“Well I wasn’t going to write erotica under my real name, was I?”  That was hardly the question.  I’d been dating an erotic novelist.  The best erotic novelist in the world, if the statistics I’d seen were to be believed.  By far.  He was a billionaire.  He published new novels within months of each other, sometimes even producing three in a week.  He was a genius with porn.  Granted, that wasn’t the kind of thing one could publicly brag about.  And I’d had sex with him.  Twice or more, depending on whether or not one counted the various attempts before tonight.  I realized a bit belatedly that my prostitute theory had been completely wrong.  

The porn god billionaire on my legs idly twiddled the line of blonde hair below my belly button.  I brushed a hand through the curls on my scalp and laughed.  “Oh, god, you’ve got billions of dollars worth of pent-up libido.  I’m just going to be your sex slave from now on, aren’t I?”

In a joking reply, he took my flaccid cock into his mouth and ran his lips up and down the shaft a few times before letting it go.  That felt amazing, and it twitched, struggling valiantly to respond, but to no avail.  We were both too tired.  

I thought a moment and remembered something I hadn’t really noticed when he’d said it a few seconds ago.  The whole revelation of his profession had sort of pushed it from my mind.  “Wait a second.  You said that _you_ learned from _me_?”

He grinned, resting his chin on my upper thigh.  My penis managed another feeble twitch at the contact.  “Well, not everything, most of it has been my own ideas, but I used things I learned from you or that you inspired in the book that I just sent to my publishers.  Although that one got a bit more tame than I expected, unfortunately.  To be honest, I was actually a virgin before you, depending on how you define sex.  And you taught me the appeal of french kissing.”  Oh.  Yeah.  He never did mention much kissing in his work.  

“You were a virgin before me?  _You_?  What exactly do you mean by `how you define sex’ because I highly doubt that you really wrote that well without a lot of experience.”

He laughed.  “I’m flattered that you think that, I guess it explains how I’ve been so successful, but really I just read a lot.  And fantasize.  Apparently very well.  I was being really conservative when I said that I was a virgin before you.”  I guess I interpreted that the opposite way he meant it, because I thought he was saying that tonight had been his first time going all out and he’d done everything short of that for years, but then he clarified.  “What I mean is that you’re the first person I did anything sexual with, starting that evening on the counter.”

That surprised me.  I had to ponder it for a moment before I realized the implications of his statement.  “Wait a second, you said that you were only a virgin before _me_ depending on how you defined sex.  So you had sex with someone else at some point in the past week or so?”

He nodded.  

“Oh.  Right.  Okay.  I just thought this might be more...committed...than that...but okay...”

His brow knitted sadly.  “Oh.  Sorry.  If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t entirely consensual...”

My disappointment fled a wave of outrage at the implications of _that_.  “Wait a second, are you saying that you were _raped_ in the past week?”  I’d find whoever did that to him and...give then quite an earful.  Or just get them arrested.  Part of me definitely wanted to kill the rapist, and I knew that I might have killed for this man I was rapidly...  Rapidly what?  I wanted to say falling in love with, but didn’t trust that to be true.  I knew that I could be driven to kill by my rapidly growing...attachment to this wonderful man.  And I would never let someone harm him and go unpunished, whatever the consequences for myself.  

He shrugged.  “I didn’t really try to fight back, but I did get the sense that I wouldn’t have been able to stop him.”  Jack abruptly licked the tip of my penis.  He was trying to distract me.  And it was working.  I dropped the subject before we got sucked into another session and ended up sleeping on the couch.  I’d ended up sleeping in strange places often enough for similar reasons and I knew from experience that it should be avoided if only for the aches and pains it brought in the morning.  

Apparently unsure if he’d successfully distracted me, he started to slide my flaccid cock into his mouth and I pushed him off.  “We should definitely relocate to your bed before we fall asleep down here.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -the apron of a kilt is the flat front part of the garment  
> "hello, sweet locked-up treasure"- a reference to a Shakespeare sonnet about a concealed/protected love or lover being more precious due to rarity or being hidden. He’s also referring to the obvious double-entendre. 
> 
> Also, the next chapter may be coming along soon. It's already mostly written unless that becomes the following chapter instead, I've been adding stuff. And speaking of adding stuff, I plan to massively edit tags and the summary probably tomorrow. And I may heavily edit this chapter, adding much more detail to their second session; I need the right state of mind to write a sex scene and it was lacking after the first one here. Hopefully I'll eventually fill in the details there.


	19. Halloween

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What exactly lurks behind the painting of the bull?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is actually a song title, as usual, although the song is less fitting than the word itself. Much of this story was originally intended to coincide with the holidays involved and at this rate, maybe Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years will match up, but I'm not holding back updates to make that happen. XD Hopefully the next chapter will be up soon as it's been mostly written for the better part of a year, but my plans do tend to go awry.

That night, Jack didn’t wake me with one of his usual nightmares.  I had a nightmare of my own, as it happened.  It was just a memory, really, one of the nights when I’d been very young and they’d almost found my mother and I.  I was honestly a little surprised I’d had that dream; I rarely had nightmares when I was sleeping beside someone, and with the way Jack tended to cling...  

He wasn’t actually clinging to me now.  I looked over and realized that he wasn’t in bed at all.  The bathroom door was wide open, a little unnervingly, considering the painting door inside, so that wasn’t the reason.  It was still late at night, I checked a clock and realized we’d only fallen asleep a few hours ago.  

There was a dim light beyond the closed curtain to Jack’s studio.  I sighed.  I understood insomnia much too well.  That was probably why he was still awake.  Curiosity got the better of me, so I fumbled my glasses onto my face and went to check on him.  

I’d expected to find him painting and I did, I could smell the paint already, but that wasn’t all.  Jack sat in front of an easel, perched on a tall wooden stool, his legs drawn up to the top-most rung of the seat and a ceramic bowl on his lap.  He slept with his hair loose and we’d both changed into pajamas, but he’d tied his hair back again and taken his shirt off.  Braided his hair, actually, though the braid was in shadow behind his back.  Apparently hoping to avoid waking me, he’d left the room’s many stationary lights turned off and instead lit his work with the blue-tinged camping lantern he usually kept in the downstairs hallway.  The lantern sat on the table beyond him, casting an eerie glow over the array of colors on his palette and the painting he was working on as well as himself.  The rest of the room was incredibly dark, despite that glow.  Jack himself cast much of the room in shadow and the many easels created a forest of shadow and pale-lit objects.  

The bowl on Jack’s lap held a medley of corn and lima beans that I only vaguely recognized as succotash.  I couldn’t remember having ever seen that in the fridge and wondered off-hand where he’d gotten it as I remarked, noticing that he held a spoon in one hand and his paintbrush in the other, “I’m not sure eating while painting is a particularly good idea.  Try not to mix up your hands, alright?”  

He didn’t react.  He hadn’t looked up when I walked in and as I approached to see what he was painting, I realized that he was wearing headphones.  Ah, that explained that.  It was more than a little creepy walking over to my completely oblivious boyfriend in this dark and dead silent house in the middle of the night, almost like some episode of the Twilight Zone.  The glass wall didn’t help.  Looking outside, I could barely distinguish the oblivion of the darkened nearby houses from the sky.  Beyond that, the city lights seemed oddly distant.  Looking down the hill, I saw the glow of a handful of Halloween decorations and garden lights, but the foliage shaded the stairs and dark houses almost completely.  Motion drew my eyes and I caught the dim glow of three separate cigarettes.  One was the neighbor, the man with the checkered suit, smoking on his balcony.  I couldn’t see him well in such minimal light, but I got the unnerving sense that he was looking up, watching Jack.  Probably thinking he had weird neighbors, or at least I hoped so.  Jack really should get some curtains here.  

The other smokers were by the stairs.  One was across the way, also on a balcony outside a house.  The man seemed to be sitting down, doing something while he smoked.  I couldn’t see him by anything but the light of his cigarette, so I only got the vague sense that he was assembling or maybe cleaning something.  He looked fairly normal, if muscular, and he wore some kind of small hat, maybe a beret.  It seemed normal enough, perhaps he just couldn’t sleep and had gone out for a smoke, in any case, he wasn’t staring eerily at us and he seemed to be in his own house, so I overlooked him.  

I’d nearly dismissed the third man as well, but that had been a mistake.  Standing where he was, he had seemed to be on a landing of the stairs, just smoking outside.  It was a little creepy to be doing so this late at night, but apparently that was common practice and he could easily live nearby, but then I noticed that he wasn’t on the stairs.  His shadow blended in with the bushes in Jack’s small front yard, so I’d thought that he stood beyond them, but looking again I realized I’d been wrong: he was standing in Jack’s yard, leaning against the fence in a place where I highly doubted anyone passing along the road would have noticed him.  In fact, he might be virtually invisible to anyone without the exact aerial vantage point of Jack’s second floor windows.  The hidden smoker lowered his cigarette briefly and what little I could see of his attire seemed eerily black and red.  The Legion were still watching Jack.  Why?

Going out to confront him wouldn’t be helpful and calling the police would probably blow my cover, though I hated to use that term.  I looked back down at Jack, thinking of that, and remembering that he’d never even considered calling the cops when that journalist had shown up shot in his bathroom.  That was odd.  The idea that he might somehow be involved with the Legion briefly crossed my mind again and I dismissed it.  There was no way.  Maybe he’d come here illegally?  That could be it.  Or perhaps he’d been somehow implicated in a crime or similarly falsely accused.  There had to be some reason, and I didn’t expect it to be really bad.  

I wanted to ask, but now was not the time.  I was exhausted and started to get a headache.  He’d said before that he sometimes forgot to sleep, so I’d remind him and then get back to bed.  I was about to tap him on the shoulder when I paused, figuring I’d wait until he moved the brush away from the canvas so as not to mess him up.  That led me to look at the painting.  

It already looked incredible, considering it had been a blank canvas just a few hours ago.  The whole canvas had been blanketed in vibrant ultramarine and it created an oddly shadowed effect to the layers of thin paint overtop of it.  He’d sketched the form in black, the lines barely visible over the dark blue.  He’d painted eyes, bright gold and defiant, if not arrogant, in the face of an animal I almost mistook for a dog.  It seemed to leap towards the viewer, but the angle was strange.  With the background so minimal, I couldn’t be sure, but the animal almost appeared to be jumping off a bridge, diving towards the viewer.  As I half expected, the stunningly realistic thylacine’s face bore the faintest ghost of the animal’s skull, as if the skull were reflected in glass over the image.  Like most of Jack’s work, the painting was haunting.  I saw the finished lion nearby, that one practically radiated either despondence or guilt; this new painting, on the other hand, seemed irrevocably alive, even youthful.  The thing was, between the faint skull, the dark color scheme, the falling subject, or maybe just Jack’s hollow stare as he painted, I found that both paintings bore an equal— and disturbing— resemblance to post-mortem photography.  

Jack drew back, scarfing down a heaping spoonful of succotash and turning to wash his brush in preparation for switching to a different color.  He flinched when I tapped his shoulder.  

*       *       *

I hadn’t expected Arcade to wake up.  I wasn’t upset but...this was a personal thing.  I had to do this painting, and I would have preferred to do it in solitude, just so I could freely sort out my thoughts and express them without interruption.  This was Ven, in a way.  His golden eyes, the fur shaded the same tan as his skin, the stripes as black as his hair.  And the moment he had followed me into the Thames.  This painting was a portrait of Ven, and this was my way of getting over him.  I wasn’t ready to tell Arcade everything that had happened with him yet.  I wasn’t ready to talk about him much at all.  Hopefully, finishing this painting would help, just as the sad old lion had been a sort of farewell to my father.  I had never really finished that painting; I was always adding and editing, even after all these years.  I didn’t expect this portrait of Ven to be any different.  

*       *       *

Jack clearly had not wished to be interrupted.  He was not hostile, but it was still obvious.  I expected him to politely suggest that the doctor go back to sleep and continue painting, but as usual the Scotsman surprised me.  Supposedly, he’d worn a kilt today, which surprised me as well, for a lot of reasons.  I still couldn’t tell if my interest in him was driven purely by his way of doing the unexpected or by some kind of affection for the only surviving friend of the boy I had been all those years ago.  Probably both were contributing factors.  

Arcade apparently recognized Jack’s desire for privacy, even if he hadn’t expected it.  He stepped back slightly as Jack took out his headphones.  “Sorry.  I just wanted to make sure you were alright.  Couldn’t sleep?”  

Jack set down the dregs of his meal and stood, starting to put away his paints.  “No, I’m sorry.  I had things on my mind.  This was one of them.”  He pressed a sheet of wax paper over his palette to keep the paint wet and added, “Could you flip the light switch at the far right?  It’s the low spots, they should be enough to see by and I can turn off the lantern and leave it here.”  

I tensed, freezing completely.  I knew the house very well, but the lights were new, and although I remembered the spotlights he’d mentioned, what little I knew of the doctor suggested that he was extremely cautious; he might easily turn on the overhead lights instead, leaving me unable to hide.  

As much as I trusted my men, if our agents down the street had taken Jack earlier today, they likely served Lanius, in which case I hardly expected the man to leave Jack alone now.  Until I could be certain that they were out of the picture, I could not trust that he would be safe.  That was why I had had him watched since this afternoon, even in addition to my own occasional stops to ensure his safety.  Once Lanius’ current allies were eliminated, I would have some time to entice Jack to openly serve the Legion, and once Caesar counted him as an ally, Lanius would find it much more difficult to harass me, at least in any effective manner.  His agents would not knowingly act against me, or at least there were few who dared, and if Jack was a known ally hand-picked by myself, Lanius’ options would be quite limited indeed.  

Tonight, about an hour ago, I had come in by the balcony, replacing the agent I’d had in the hidden upstairs hallway and ordering him to hide in the garden instead, to keep watch.  “Hide” was perhaps inaccurate; I wanted him seen if Lanius’ men approached.  It would be clear enough who had ordered this house watched when a frumentarius lurked outside.  I had come inside to ensure that no one could reach Jack without my knowledge.  I did not want my unpredictable friend to slip out for a walk, or otherwise leave my protection inadvertently.  He was much too prone to finding trouble.  Discovering him painting and dangerously dead to the world, I had hidden to watch.  It was really quite fascinating to observe his technique, I might have picked up a few tricks for my own rare artistic endeavors.  

To my relief, Arcade only did as Jack asked, and I found that he hesitated to do even that.  Switching the dim spotlights on, he explained, “You should really get some curtains, you know people can see in quite clearly when you have lights on up here at night.”  The spotlights he’d activated only lit the area nearest the windows, leaving me completely in shadow.  Nonetheless, I remained very still.  I was not about to push my luck with such a cautious and probably armed man whom I knew so little about.  

Jack took Arcade’s warning in a different way.  

*       *       *

“What, do you have something in mind?” he answered, casting a flirtatious glance towards the doctor that stopped the older man in his tracks.  Apparently, Jack had at least realized the wisdom of that suggestion, because he added more seriously, “I have noticed that, but I like the view at night.  I might look into replacing them with one-way glass.”  Now that was a commendable idea.  

Arcade started to say something, apparently too spooked to respond to Jack’s flirting in kind.  I knew he had not seen me— he would have confronted me if he had, there was no reason for him not to— but there were many other things he may have noticed.  My agent in the yard, for one.  And if the ex-sniper was acting as I expected that he would, the doctor may have managed to notice him as well.  I planned to check the window when possible, to see if either might still be visible.  

Jack preempted the doctor again, shutting off the lantern and leaving his empty bowl on the table with his paints.  “I need to let the paint dry now anyway, I can go back to bed.”  That was a lie.  Though not in the middle of blending wet colors, there seemed little reason for him to be unable to paint until a certain section dried.  Now he was just flirting.  Some unpleasant emotion brushed the back of my mind, and I did not acknowledge it.  Right now, keeping Jack safe was the priority and I could not afford distractions.  I could analyze the unexpected reaction at a later date; I didn’t bother to do so now.  

*       *       *

I don’t know what I’d planned to say, the thought left my mind when Jack crossed the room in three quick strides and kissed me.  The kiss was passionate, but didn’t last long.  He had paint on his hands and arms and stepped around me into the bathroom to clean them off, not bothering to turn on any lights.  I shut off the lights in the studio, almost feeling giddy from that kiss, despite my worry, and started to follow Jack.  

I glimpsed motion out of the corner of my eye and froze, looking back into the studio.  With the lights off, the forest of easels managed to look even more creepy.  Shadows and stools masqueraded as crouched men, but nothing moved.  

“You alright?”  Jack was watching me from the bathroom door as he dried his arms.  

“Yeah.  Just a trick of the light, I guess...”  The eerie paintings leering at me didn’t make the studio any more comforting, even if it was devoid of life.  I didn’t really believe in ghosts, but this house had started to make me wonder.  I shuddered and closed the curtain, turning back towards Jack and getting into bed.  He joined me.  

“You’ve been very on edge.  Did those guys at the party really creep you out that much?”

*       *       *

He started to answer and flinched as Rex slunk over to nose his side and whine.  “Please tell me this doesn’t mean he has to go out?”  It didn’t.  But it was weird.  Judging by his teeth, Rex was an old dog, his beat-up body seemed to confirm this.  He slept most of the time since I’d gotten him; he’d been sleeping when I’d gotten up, only raising his head to check on me.  Most nights, he didn’t get off his bed to follow me, which was probably because I took him off his wheelie cart so he could sleep, making it difficult for him to get around.  If he had to go out, he nosed the cart; I’d seen him do that several times already.  Now he was nosing Arcade.  And whining.  This was strange.  

Even in the short time I’d had Rex, sometimes, when I was alone, something little had set me off.  Sometimes the water came on cold, sometimes the fact that my phone had become a glorified clock reminded me how many people had cut ties with me, sometimes I just happened to think of them, of Ven, or my mother, or the home I’d probably never see again.  When that happened, Rex whined and nosed me.  Realizing that, my concern lessened and I grinned gently.  “I think he’s worried about you.”  

“That makes two of us.”  He scratched the dog’s ears and Rex nuzzled his hand.  He really seemed to like Arcade now, which surprised me considering that he’d apparently been quite timid just a few weeks ago.  

“You knew his previous owner, right?”

He nodded.  

“Was he this friendly with you then?”

“No,” he began, but tensed again, seeming to hear something.  Rex turned his head towards the studio, perking his ears and giving strength to the suspicion.  After a long moment of silence in the dark, Arcade dismissed it and continued, “He was a bit standoffish then, he only really liked people he knew very well and tended to be more of a guard dog than a pet.”  

“Then he’s really taken a liking to both of us.  I haven’t met many old dogs this quick to trust.  At least not smart ones, the sight hounds and labs tend to love everybody they meet.”  

*       *       *

I petted Rex absently, considering the dog.  Jack had a point, even if he hadn’t been trying to make it.  Rex didn’t trust strangers.  I must have just been imagining the creaking I’d thought I’d heard from the studio.  The dog would show some sign if there was someone in the house.  

It was late, I was tired, and my paranoia was worrying both Jack and Rex.  And even though I didn’t get bad hangovers, I could feel a headache coming on and that would make sleep even more difficult.  I sighed and tried to relax.  

*       *       *

I watched him for a moment, well aware that something had clearly spooked him.  Maybe it had just been Cato and the other men at the party, or maybe it had been something else, but he wasn’t doing anything about it and I trusted that decision.  If he wasn’t doing anything, there probably wasn’t anything to be done, and yet he was still worrying about whatever it was that had him on edge.  

I rolled onto my side and snuggled against him, pulling him into the kind of hug I could comfortably maintain while sleeping.  “It’s alright, Arcade.”  

I had my eyes closed, my face half on his shoulder, but I could tell that he was looking down at me.  One hand brushed some of the bangs that had escaped my braid off my face and slid down to lie across my back.  I don’t know if he thought I had fallen asleep already or what, but he said nothing.  I did fall asleep in a matter of moments and I think he might have dozed off as well.  

*       *       *

I slunk back through the bedroom in careful silence.  The studio floor annoyed me; the old floor boards, though well-maintained, tended to creak, and a stab of nagging pain from the healing wound in my side had caused me to stumble.  I knew they’d heard the sound, but luckily they’d ignored it. I did not expect them to ignore a second noise while I crossed through the bedroom.  

I found myself slightly surprised to find that Arcade had taken off his gun.  It lay on the table beside the bed, carefully concealed in the shadows between the lamp and a small stack of books, likely his own and not Jack’s.  I moved closer to investigate the weapon, hoping to glean some further detail of his enigmatic life from the pistol.  Having found almost nothing about him, I had expected an unusually powerful weapon and was not disappointed.  It was a Desert Eagle, an old model, heavily refurbished and customized to the point that it was clearly still functional, despite its age.  Functionality had taken priority over aesthetics; the metal had been heavily scratched and worn until it hardly gleamed, and some of that might have been intentional, to further conceal the powerful weapon.  I could not place the exact model, but recognized the caliber at a glance, the gun was, to my surprise an older, modified equivalent of my own pistol, which was a .45 caliber.  This had to be a previous model of the weapon in a .50 caliber version.  An admirable gun, appearance aside.  

They were normally used for hunting and sport, but given its age, I suspected that this had been selected for other reasons, perhaps a family heirloom of sorts.  

I would have picked up the weapon to check for any further allusions to this man’s past, as well as to unnerve him by moving it slightly, but the dog lay between me and the pistol.  I had dropped by often, taking care to acclimate the animal to my presence, so Rex no longer barked or growled at me, but he was not friendly.  He knew who I was, he smelled the Legion on me and I suppose he recalled that my comrades had exterminated his previous owner and that man’s gang.  I did not expect the dog to ever warm to me completely.  

Stepping around the canine would have been difficult with my injury, and I doubted I would learn any more from the handgun.  They were asleep, and safe for now.  It was time to determine why I had not yet heard the sniper eliminate Jack’s closest threat.

*       *       *

I was roused quite abruptly by a surge of adrenaline, motion, and a sound I couldn’t recall.  Arcade already sat bolt upright, eyes wide, having clearly been startled awake by the noise.  One of his hands had shot to the bedside table and rested on his gun, though he hadn’t picked it up or turned off the safety.  Having been lying on my stomach, the sound had apparently spooked me into clinging to Arcade rather than sitting up: I had my arms around him in what was probably a rather painful hug, my fingers digging into his ribs.  My head was pressed against his chest, so I could easily hear how fast his heart was beating and knew that he managed to be even more tense than I was.  Maybe he’d been awake for the noise.  

Fright had brought my legs up beneath me, leaving me straddling his thigh in what was almost a split.  Aside from leaving my crotch in direct contact with him, the position was massively uncomfortable and I released him to sit properly on the bed before straddling his leg could get me hard.  

Before I could ask what he’d heard, before I could even fully settle onto the blankets, another two quiet shots broke the silence, stirring Rex into a nervous whine.  He barked and paced the floor, clearly unsure what to do.  I shared that sentiment, and I expected to find the same confusion in Arcade.  

Looking up at the gentle doctor, however, I found his expression set in a focused frown.  He was staring towards the curtain as the sound seemed to have come from outside, probably from a house across the way.  His eyes flicked to me and I watched him blankly, waiting for any cue he might give.  I certainly had no idea what to do, and if he did, that was better than my cluelessness.  

The night became quiet again for a painfully long moment, eventually broken by the clacking of Rex’s claws as he hauled himself back into his dog bed and lay down.  The shooting had stopped, that was good enough for me.  I had a mind to follow my dog’s example when Arcade got up, gun in hand.  He kept a finger on the safety but didn’t turn it off.  I’d been a little out of it the last time I’d seen him this tense, but now I could get the full effect.  Earlier he’d just been uneasy, now he was fully on-guard, as he had been after the earthquake.  I wondered again what he’d heard that night.  Probably the gunshot that had injured Vulpes, come to think of it.  And now he’d heard shooting again.  This went beyond creepy watchers, this was something he saw as an open threat.  

I was tired, but I had a great track record of staving off sleep and as much as I wanted to go back to bed, seeing my typically docile boyfriend prowling over to the curtain like fucking James Bond turned me on more than a little.  I also noticed that the man could move almost as silently as Vulpes, when he wanted to.  Traits I’m attracted to were hot, smart, and quiet, apparently.  And maybe just a little sassy.  

Not that I expected him to be sassy or seductive right now; I could tell Arcade was completely focused on what he’d heard.  I got out of bed and crept along behind him, invoking a quick glance before he looked back towards the curtain and slid it aside, stepping into my studio without a sound.  I followed closely, only looking back to see Rex giving us the kind of look dogs gave when they wondered what their crazy owners were doing out of bed so late at night.  Dogs tended to think that people were out of their minds to do anything but eat, sleep, and play with them all day.  Well, with the exception of sex.  Most animals generally understood that _that_ was worth getting out of bed for.  Or going into bed for, as the case may be.  

I found the studio mostly as I had left it, lights out, except that my curious glance happened to realize that my empty bowl of succotash had disappeared.  In its place rested a tiny slip of paper beneath the stone stallion that had somehow relocated from the other corner of my painting desk.  I didn’t need to read the note to figure that Vulpes had been here.  Arcade didn’t notice anything out of place; he went straight for the window.  

*       *       *

Outside, lights were on all down the stairs.  The man in Jack’s garden was gone, or more well-hidden and none of the other smokers were visible.  Daisy’s lights were on down the street and as we watched I saw her step out onto her roof-patio in her pajamas.  She looked up and down the stairs, seemingly unable to place the sound and then I watcher her gaze drift unmistakably up towards us.  With the lights out in the studio, there was no way she could see that we were standing here, so that glance was either concern or suspicion.  This had nothing to do with me, and probably nothing to do with Jack, given his clueless demeanor behind me, so only the former was relevant.  And we were fine.  For now, anyway.  

The other neighbors seemed just as confused as Daisy.  Half a dozen men and women, including the man in the checkered suit turned on lights and stepped outside, or looked out windows.  This was a nice neighborhood.  Shootings just didn’t happen.  Especially shootings with the kind of range those shots had seemed to have.  I guessed sniper rifle.  

I watched for at least ten minutes, feeling Jack lean against a table beside me, getting bored and restless, as he so often did.  I was just about to decide that we were safe, and there was nothing more I could learn tonight, when I noticed something odd.  The house across the stairs was dark.  Completely dark, not just dimly lit, even though every other house on the street was awake from the shots.  Not only that, but looking over the finely tended garden, I noticed a real estate sign.  It was for sale.  There was no one living there.  And yet that was the house where I’d watched a man smoking on the balcony.  Putting two and two together, I also recalled that that object he’d been cleaning had born an eerie resemblance to a sniper rifle.  

The house looked empty enough now, no glint of a cigarette in any windows.  Any intelligent man would already be gone, so there was probably no use investigating.  I heard sirens soon enough and headed back to bed.  

*       *       *

Settling into bed beside him, I wasn’t tired.  I mean, I still felt tired, physically, but standing up, waiting for him to be satisfied that we were safe had made me restless.  I wanted to do something, and I would have suggested sex if his expression hadn’t told me he wasn’t likely to be interested right now.  Even after making sure that there weren’t gunmen surrounding the house or whatever he’d been checking for outside, he couldn’t relax.  I watched him lay in bed for a good five minutes before I spoke.  “Can’t sleep?”

He shook his head and then frowned at me, the slightest hint of a grimly amused smirk curling his lips.  “You aren’t concerned that somebody was shooting just outside your house?”

I shrugged.  “Hey, they weren’t shooting at me, for a change.”

He chuckled and sighed.  “You’re much too used to danger, Jack.”

“What can I say?  I live on the edge.”  I got up and walked somewhat casually towards the bathroom.  I guess he thought I planned to use it because he didn’t get up, so I paused in the doorway to explain.  I could tell he was trying to calm down so he could sleep and talking had helped, even such a short conversation, but I saw the tight set of his jaw and the way he was keeping his breathing very controlled.  He was still nervous, not only nervous but on-edge.  Like he expected somebody to break in with a gun at any moment.  It was the same tension I felt in cars around trucks, or on narrow roads.  Did both my boyfriends actually have PTSD?  No.  There was no way.  I was just seeing it everywhere because I had it.  

“You know, I figured that, since you can’t sleep, and since I’m wide awake now, maybe there’s something we could investigate.”

He raised an eyebrow, looking over at me.  I’m not sure if he was just puzzled or if he thought that I was somehow leading into suggesting sex, but I could tell he didn’t get where I was going with this.  At least he was a bit distracted from the gunshots.  “Investigate?”

I nodded.  “You know the bull painting?  Well, there’s got to be some way to open it from this side, I figured we could move the shelf and mess with it a bit, hopefully open it up and figure out what’s on the other side.  I thought it might put your mind at ease to know there’s nobody lurking back there and we aren’t living above the murdered body of the home’s previous owner.”  I stammered a little at the word home, and I think he caught the significance of that.  

He got up.  “Jack, this is your home, as long as you want it to be.”  He gave me a brief hug, I guess I’d looked like I’d needed it.  Damn it, I kept getting so emotional around him, it drove me crazy.  I didn’t talk about the recent problems I’d had explicitly to avoid this happening, and yet it had still happened so frequently that he’d figured out enough to be able to say that.  He’d hit the nail on the head, as usual, as both he and Vulpes so often seemed to do.  At least I wasn’t getting all teary eyed around Vulpes; even if he didn’t mind I’d kill myself out of embarrassment.  Okay, not really, but I’d be far from happy if I broke down around him.  I had broken down around him, actually, now that I remembered it.  Jeez, at least neither of my boyfriends seemed to care that I was such an emotional train wreck.  

At least this time I shook it off quickly.  “Right.  Well, let’s move that bookcase.”

Between the two of us, that didn’t take long, and soon we were left staring at the daunting painting.  

“That painting looks more possessed every time I see it.  Jack, if you can sell it, please do so.  I mean, unless you like the whole `haunted house’ decorating style, and it could probably add some pink slime and red-eyed caretakers to the mix, if that’s your thing.”

I chuckled and eyed the bull.  “You really think it looks possessed?”

“You don’t?  All it needs is slight changes in its expression when you’re not looking.”  He ran a hand over the edges of the frame, feeling for switches or seams.  “Honestly, I’m not positive that it _doesn’t_ look more malevolent now than before.”

“It _is_ unnerving.”  I felt the other side, not looking for switches so much as probing the intricate golden frame and prodding and tugging every little bit I could find.  I ran from the top to the bottom and found something halfway down.  Arcade jumped back as my ring finger slipped inward, following the concealed button amid the interlocking leaves and curls of metal.  The door clicked and unlatched.  I felt the weight easing outward against my hand and guided it open.  

For the barest fraction of a second, I swear I saw someone turn and walk out of sight on the balcony.  The hallway itself was dark, and the balcony light was off as well, but the bathroom cast enough illumination past me to reveal a switch on the wall.  I flicked it, feeling Arcade step a little closer to me.  I realized that he was holding his gun again, safety off this time.  

*       *       *

The hallway behind the painting extended back to the front of the house, reaching the balcony and turning left at its sliding glass doors.  Above the black and white tile floors, the walls were red, lined with paintings lit by spotlights and framed in gold.  Jack strode in, curiosity and his own danger-friendly nature overriding any common sense he should have.  Or maybe he was just oblivious to the fact that this section of the house was very probably unlocked.  Or maybe I was being paranoid.  I’d heard three gunshots tonight, and that was three to many for me to let my guard down now.  It didn’t help that I felt the faintest trace of cool air and caught the scent of jasmine as if somebody had just opened and closed the balcony door.  

It was locked when we got to it.  There was a single chair on the balcony and a single table with an old radio and one battered copy of The Collected Works of Benjamin Franklin on the table, still bookmarked.  A thin layer of dirt and a few leaves had settled over the table and book, but not the chair.  ...Okay, that was totally not creepy.  

The paintings, as Jack examined them, oblivious to the balcony and book, were all empty frames, as if someone had come through and removed whatever art used to be here.  Aside from the glass door to the balcony where the hallway turned left, there was another door a short distance away.  It looked like a closet, but I could tell from the shape of the house that there should be more room in that corner, enough room for a staircase, I suspected.  We hadn’t found the basement he supposedly had, and there still remained an inaccessible section of the first floor, unless it was just unused.  

Jack rested his hand on the brass doorknob and paused, looking back at me.  “Is the balcony locked?”  

I nodded.  He seemed surprised that I hadn’t replied aloud, but I didn’t explain.  It was habit.  I was tense, and armed, and usually that mandated being silent as well, not that I wanted to make much noise even now, just in case there was someone lurking around here.  I didn’t trust this part of the house.  Why would it be hidden otherwise?  And Jack’s house did have an alarming tendency to let in intruders, including, apparently, one who had raped him.  Unless he’d been raped elsewhere.  It was possible, but that seemed less likely.  

Perhaps belatedly, I made the connection.  After I’d learned that he’d been to the hospital and tried to hide it from me, I’d mentioned that to Garret, who had remarked that Veronica and Raul had driven him to and from the hospital that time.  Veronica had found him at his house, although I’d never heard any more detail than that.  If she’d found him, and he’d needed to go to the hospital, I had figured that he’d just had another accidental concussion or something, but it seemed much more likely now that someone had broken in and raped him.  Probably in his own bed, while he’d been asleep, I guessed.  It seemed the standard situation as that went, date-rape aside.  I’d treated enough similar cases that that was my guess, anyway.  Again, I was almost glad I didn’t know who had done it.  If I had, I might have done something I’d regret.  

Jack opened the door, revealing the staircase I’d expected.  It was narrow, and dangerously steep, but the steps were polished stone tiles and the walls bore an expensive-looking red and gold mosaic.  It looked almost roman, featuring bulls and canines and other animals I didn’t look at too closely.  I didn’t have much time to study the mosaic because Jack, also studying the mosaic, stepped in carefully and almost fell as his foot slid off the step.  I dove to catch him, barely keeping him from tumbling straight down the steep two-story staircase.  I nearly fell myself, in the process and wound up kneeling at the top of the stairs with him sitting beside me.  

The frantic grab had left my gun-holding arm across his chest, the barrel of the weapon pointed up, away from us, but pressed against the underside of his throat.  Even though I’d kept it from pointing at anyone, that was still too close for comfort.  

We got up and back onto the hallway tile.  “The stairs are wet.” Jack explained, regaining his footing.  

“Wet?”  I was whispering.  It wasn’t a question, not really, I was just a bit confused and more than a little disturbed that the stairs in a deserted part of the house had any reason to be wet.  

Jack shrugged and pointed, noting a section of the tiles up here that were also wet, albeit much less so.  It looked like they’d been hastily dried sometime within the past hour, if not more recently.  That was unsettling.  

There was a thick metal banister on the basement stairs, one on each side and both quite easy to grip.  Gripping both banisters like ski-poles, Jack carefully stumbled his way down the stairs, slipping every step even when he anticipated the slick tile.  I followed as carefully as I could, but ultimately had to re-holster my gun for the decent, drawing it again as soon as I reached the bottom.  

Now we knew why the stairs were wet, or at least we had a very good guess.  Aside from a small closet and a room beneath the staircase, this entire floor was taken up by the largest swimming pool I had ever seen.  Spanning the full acreage of the house— which was quite large as city homes went— the pool was bordered by a dangerously narrow walkway of red, black, and gold tiles.  The walls, likewise, were tiled in red, black, and gold and the floor of the pool bore a mosaic in the same colors.  Through the clear water I could see a massive golden bull glittering beneath the dim light of the room’s five beaded chandeliers.  The black painted ceiling added to the orange-tinted lighting, making the whole room feel eerily dark.  The water seemed clean, but I smelled no chemicals.  Not chlorinated, I guess.  Well at least that was one toxic chemical less likely to be found in Jack’s basement.  

Apparently unimpressed to learn that he had a gigantic swimming pool in his basement, Jack checked the closets.  The first, unsurprisingly, held towels and nothing else.  There were probably five dozen, all plain white or red and all fairly cheap.  For the most part, they fit perfectly and filled the closet’s many shelves, but one seemed to be missing.  Jack didn’t fail to see this.  “Someone broke into my house to swim.  Hardly a threatening burglar.”  He laughed but I didn’t share his humor.  

“That isn’t a good thing, Jack.”

Serious again, he nodded.  “Still, it’s better than having him break in to kill me.”  He was taking this way too well.  Why was I not surprised.  

Jack went to the next door and opened it.  More stairs, just as steep as the first set and much darker, lit only by a single shaded bulb in the ceiling and entirely covered in black stone tile.  At least they weren’t wet.  

We went down carefully anyway, though this time I managed to keep my gun out in one hand.  The floor below was just as massive, but there were no lights.  From above, the walls of the pool had appeared to be mirrored, but now I realized that they were all one-way glass.  Down here, the fifteen-foot deep pool began at floor-level.  It was like a human aquarium, or it would have been if anyone was swimming.  This was almost more creepy than the painting-door.  A pool with a whole level dedicated to watching the swimmers while remaining unseen, who built this house, H. H. Holmes?  It didn’t help that this room, like the stairs was entirely ebony.  There was no closet here, but a single door revealed a third staircase, which led, as it turned out, to the basement’s lowest level.  I’d thought the worst we would find was one or maybe two armed and homicidal squatters.  I _wish_ that had been what we’d found.  

The last staircase, unlike the previous two, ended in a locked door.  It didn’t need a key, it was just a knob to engage and disengage the deadbolt.  I only realized the implications of that much later.  Curious and reckless as ever, Jack unlocked and opened the door, flicking a row of switches on the wall of the staircase and vanishing into the last room.  Like the upper two floors, this section of the basement was mostly one massive chamber, undivided by walls except for a small closet in the corner.  Unlike the others, this room was far from empty, and what it held shot my opinion of the house from irrationally creepy to hellish.  

The floor and walls were seamless sheets of concrete, smooth and utilitarian, probably intended to be easily cleaned.  Beneath dozens of panels of fluorescent lights on the thirty-foot-high cement ceiling, this room had several very distinct sections.  The back had empty shelves for storage, like it had once been some kind of warehouse.  Ahead of the empty shelves along the left-hand wall was a series of large crates and boxes on identical shelving units, all labeled and all basic food products, flour, corn, canned foods, et cetera.  Those were by far the most innocuous of the many items the room contained.  Against the left corner, closest to the stairs a pile of unmarked crates had been stacked with a large sack beside them.  I didn’t pay much attention to the crates and sack yet, much more distracted by the other half of the room.  

The right half of the room had been divided by chain-link fencing and cages ranging from stacked dog crates to a set of fenced enclosures about ten cubic feet in size.  Those ones had been heavily reinforced and wires woven into the metal mesh suggested that they were once, if not currently, electrified.  The cages were empty, they looked as if they’d been quite hastily cleaned, but I noticed uncomfortably that some of them had open padlocks hanging off the doors.  I couldn’t think of a reason that one would have to padlock a dog cage, unless whatever the cage contained had the intelligence and dexterity to open the door.  There _was_ a gang of slavers in the area, supposedly.  

*       *       *

The cages made me shudder.  I tore my gaze away from them.  They weren’t an active threat as long as we were alone.  I wanted to see what else was down here, then we’d go back upstairs, close the whole place off and pretend it had never existed.  Looking away from the cages, I saw a rack of leather whips, leashes, and less easy-to-identify torture devices.  Some of those could be fun, I supposed, but I doubted they’d ever been but to such a pleasurable purpose.  The thought made me sick.  The whole room smelled strongly of cleaning products and I found myself wondering if anyone had died here.  They probably had.  So much for exploring to help us sleep.  

I checked the closet, vaguely aware that Arcade was sticking close to me, gun still in hand as if he expected someone to jump out when I opened the door.  The closet was lifeless, but not empty.  There was a machine inside, some kind of generator that filled most of the room.  I’d never seen anything like it, but I had yet to get a good look at a private electrical generator, so I just figured that’s what this was.  Maybe I just hadn’t gotten an oil bill yet.  It was clearly still running, so it must have some kind of fuel.  There was a little black plastic box on the floor in front of it, textured like some kind of case.  It looked sturdy, maybe even military and my first thought was a gun case.  I crouched to examine it and realized that Arcade seemed unsettled by the generator.  I looked up, one hand on the latch of the gun case.  “What is it?”

He shuddered.  “N-nothing.”  It was definitely not nothing.  But I was disturbed enough already that I let it go.  I could just ask him later.  

He crouched beside me as I flicked the latch, opening the lid of the case and revealing what was, unmistakably a gun, even if I’d never seen one like it.  It was lighter and more slender than a standard pistol, equipped with something that seemed to be a mold for some needle-like object and a series of very small glass vials filled with some strange liquid.  Arcade’s eyes widened and again, I was sure he recognized the thing, but he didn’t explain.  “Jack, close that very carefully and put it back.”

I didn’t move.  “Why?  What is it?”

“Please, just put it away and let’s get out of here.”

I stared at him.  “Why?”

He met my gaze, some grudging look in his eyes like there was something that he wanted to tell me but couldn’t say.  “It’s extremely rare and dangerous.  Look, I can’t explain, I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.  Let’s just leave it at that, alright?”

After a long pause, I clicked the case shut and closed the closet back up.  Back in the main room, I nodded towards the stuff by the left hand wall.  “If the things in the closet are so dangerous, should we look through all that?”  

He hesitated.  I knew that he _really_ didn’t want to, but ignorance wasn’t a risk he was willing to take.  He nodded.  “We’ll check it carefully and get out of here.”

We checked.  Working back to front, we spent at least an hour sorting through food, mostly non-perishables and basic rations.  Earthquake supplies, I figured, or hoped.  If this whole place was innocent, I’d assume earthquake supplies.  There was a fridge, which was strange as nothing seemed to need refrigeration, but it was empty when we opened and searched it.  I didn’t realize until much later that we’d never checked the freezer.  Aside from that, we didn’t find anything weird until we got to the unlabeled crates.  They were mostly open, the lids just resting on top and easily moved.  Arcade opened one up and froze.  

By this point, I was beside him.  I’d been about to open the sack but I stopped to see what he’d found.  The whole crate was packed to the brim with plastic explosives.  Three enormous crates, three hundred packs of C4.  Arcade and I swore in unison, his curse decidedly more mild than my own.  He frowned at me.  “Was that even English?”  

My accent had come back, but that wasn’t all, “Not all of it.  Russian, German, Latin, Swahili, and Gaelic just seemed more appropriate for some of their profanity.  I thought the moment called for a more colorful vocabulary.”

He laughed grimly.  “Well, finding enough explosives to demolish half the city is pretty good cause for no-holds-barred swearing.  Check that sack and let’s get out of here, please.”

I checked the sack—

—and recoiled at what I saw.  It was a large sack, easily big enough to hold a corpse but the shape hadn’t suggested a body, so I was more than a little shocked to find a desiccated human face staring up at me.  I expected a smell, but there was none, probably because the rest of the bag was filled with salt which had practically mummified the body inside.  Arcade grimaced at the sight as well and I looked to him, hoping for a more professional assessment on how and when this had happened.  The corpse didn’t bother me between the lack of stench or stomach wound, but we could only see his hands and leering face.  I figured it was a man, I don’t know why, the skin was so stretched and leathery that I couldn’t really tell.  Beneath what remained of his short, black dreadlocks, he had a look somewhere between rage and agony, his face contorted in a snarl that had only become more terrifying as his skin pulled back from his skull.  His eyes were almost completely intact, and his hate-filled stare quickly became unnerving.  His hands, the skin dried and sunken over the phalanges had curled as if clawing at his murderers, but his pose suggested that he’d been dead when he’d been thrown in here.  Bloodstains darkened his arms and wrists, emanating from large holes in his palms where the bones had been pushed apart.  I had a feeling I knew what had happened to him, particularly given how so much of the salt had turned pink with blood.  

Arcade shuddered beside me.  “Jack, what do you think happened to this guy?”

Why was he asking me?  I gave him a questioning stare, then sighed and answered.  “Well, judging from those hands...”

I heard him swallow uncomfortably.  “...crucified?”

I nodded.  “Looks like it...”

One of the bags we’d rummaged through fell over behind us and both of us bolted back to the upstairs balcony before we realized what we’d heard.  Figuring it out we laughed nervously, catching our breaths after sprinting three long, steep flights of stairs.  I felt like I was going to pass out, trying to catch my breath with my mostly healed broken rib.  It was still just sore enough to make hard breathing hurt like hell.  

Once we caught our breaths, the humor of our fear had vanished and we were left with the cold reality of a corpse in my basement.  Arcade closed the door of the stairs.  I could tell he wanted to lock it, but saw little logical point.  Besides, that door didn’t lock.  

“Should we call someone?”

From his expression, one might have thought I’d suggested we eat it or something.  “No.  That’s a bad idea.  ...but I’m really not sure what else to do about it.”

I tilted my head.  “Why was that a bad idea?”

He gave me that enigmatic look again, the one where I knew he was hiding something but couldn’t guess what.  When the silence encroached on awkward territory, I gave up.  I had secrets of my own; I had no right to pry.  Even if his secrets seemed a bit more serious than my own.  I shook my head.  “Fine.  No cops.  What do we do?  Ignore it?  I mean, I guess it’s dead, not like a corpse poses a threat to us.”  He nodded.  I could tell he wasn’t satisfied with the solution— neither was I— but neither of us had a better idea.  “So, back to bed, bookshelf in front of the painting again, and we try to get some sleep?”

*       *       *

“...yeah...I guess.”  I wasn’t exactly in a restful state of mind, actually I was probably more terrified than I had been after the gunshots, surprisingly enough, but exhaustion had started to gnaw at my coherence of thought and that headache was really getting started now, so sleep seemed like a good idea, if I could manage it.  

We did as Jack had suggested, barring the painting with the bookshelf.  I prayed that generator was in good condition almost as much as I prayed that gun had never left Jack’s basement.  I hoped the generator was maintained and conversely the gun was forgotten.  The absence of dust on the case suggested otherwise.  Going into the basement had seemed like it might assuage my fears, but it had done the exact opposite.  I felt like I was going to stay awake for hours even once Jack and I were back in bed.  He started out on his back beside me, but I guess his response to what we’d found was to become even more liable to cling.  He rolled over half on top of me and pressed his arms against my sides, not quite hugging me.  Looking down where his head rested just below my shoulder, I couldn’t see his face, so I couldn’t tell if he was doing this to calm me down or because he was terrified himself.  This was Jack, I didn’t expect him to be as sensitive to danger as I was, but finding a body might have brought one of his traumas to mind.  After a few moments of him holding onto me, I realized that I didn’t care why he was doing it.  I hugged him back, rolling onto my side and hoping that maybe having him clinging like this might somehow let me sleep, despite the knowledge of what remained below us.  I guess it worked.  

*       *       *

I woke up sometime in the night.  I hadn’t been dreaming, at least not that I remembered, but I felt Arcade’s hand on my shoulder, his fingers drumming intermittently against my skin.  Wait. Something wasn’t quite right.  Arcade was asleep.  I lay partly on top of him again, hugging his chest, my own hands on his back and side.  He was hugging me back, one hand on my upper back and the other draped loosely over my hip.  That wasn’t his hand.  

As my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light, Vulpes drummed his fingers on my shoulders again and I made out his face in the darkness.  He stood beside the bed, by my desk.  He held a finger to his lips, pointed to Arcade and then signaled that I should follow him into the studio, leaving the doctor asleep.  

That might be easier said than done.  I propped myself up on my good arm and tried to ease myself free of Arcade’s arms without waking him.  Even moving as slowly and carefully as I could, he opened his eyes as soon as I moved more than a few inches.  I grinned a bit guiltily.  

Vulpes was still beside the bed, less than a foot behind Arcade in the very narrow walkway between the bed and my desk and bookshelves, but the doctor faced away from him and turned even more onto his side, focusing on me.  He didn’t even notice the silent legionary behind him.  “What is it?”

Shit.  What could I say that wasn’t going to confirm that not only was there a man standing right behind him, not only had said man just broken into my house, as usual, and I was fine with that, but also that I was pretty regularly sleeping with said murderous, home-invading slaver?  Think fast, Jack.

“Uh, sorry.  I’m a bit peckish, can’t sleep.  I’ll be back soon, I just want a snack.”  I _was_ hungry, I was almost always hungry, so that had been the first excuse to come to mind.  Food.  Way to go, Jack, always thinking with your dick or your stomach.  Those decisions worked out surprisingly well, all things considered.  

Arcade believed it.  He nodded groggily, “Alright, just...be careful.  Wouldn’t want you giving yourself another concussion or something...”  He was _really_ tired.  I was surprised he’d woken up at all.  He closed his eyes before I even answered and seemed to fall back asleep immediately.  Crisis avoided.  

I extricated myself from the blankets, glancing at Rex when I realized that he wasn’t growling at Vulpes, as he had before.  The dog looked confused to see me out of bed again, but didn’t get up.  His gaze was locked on Vulpes and he watched as the legionary followed me downstairs.  I had some cookies in the kitchen just to add credibility to my story while Vulpes talked to me.  Upstairs, I kept the curtains drawn, but the kitchen was already bathed in the grey shine of the sun rising through the fog.  He wore a casual suit today, but he’d taken the jacket off and carried it with him.  I could see the outline of the bandage on his side, but the wound seemed to be bothering him less today.  

Even a floor below Arcade, I spoke very quietly, asking a question that had been burning in my mind ever since we’d explored the basement.  “Is that your stuff in the basement?”

He nodded.  “Some of it.”  I was surprised that he answered at all and I guess curiosity drove me to press my luck.  

“The C4, the gun, and the body?”

He tilted his head.  “You seem quite matter-of-fact about this.”

“I live dangerously.”

“That is certainly true.”  He paused.  Again, I didn’t expect an answer and he surprised me.  “Yes.  The food belongs to the Legion in general, although friends of mine generally frequent that particular stash.  The generator is not ours.”  

I paused, thoughtfully munching my first cookie.  “You left a corpse in my basement?”

“I hardly have a better place to keep it.”

“Well not my basement would have been...appreciated.  Who was it?”

“The house’s previous owner.”

Okay, I’d been right all along, I guess.  I’d always had a feeling like he’d never really left.  Not that I believed in ghosts, but damn, I wasn’t exactly glad to have the previous owner’s corpse hanging around.  “Well...I guess I can see the convenience of that spot, then.”

I guess I paused long enough to finish my cookie that he thought I’d dropped the subject.  “You will have no further troubles with the woman down the street.  I made sure that the sniper did his work properly.”

“You knew he’d kill her.  That’s pretty clever of you to use him like that.  What happens to him now?”

The ghost of a smile crept onto his face.  “Thank you.  I doubt that the police will trace the crime, so the sniper will go free, and the murder should be dismissed as a professional hit.”

I nodded, chewing my way through my second cookie.  I could finish the box, but was probably better off limiting myself to only one or two more.  Contemplating cookies kept me silent and he spoke again.  “I do not expect this to be the last attempt on your life.  Be careful.  Stay with this doctor of yours as much as possible and avoid going outside.  Farewell.”  I waved, unable to say more, and he left.  I heard the front door open and shut, locking behind him.  That was weird, I had the only key, as far as I knew.  But he had returned it to me.  He could have made copies then.  

So Vulpes had a key to my house.  I still figured that he’d kill me if I pissed him off, but knowing that he’d gone to such lengths to protect me in the past twenty-four hours had somehow conquered most of my direct fear of him.  The idea of him having such easy access to my house actually turned me on more than anything else.  As long as Arcade never caught him.  I didn’t want to see those two together, as entertaining as it could have been, that would probably end in disaster for all three of us.  Sea eagles, spiraling towards disaster is right.  


	20. The Beast and the Harlot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from the song by Avenged Sevenfold

From the time Jack got up for a snack until the morning, I was fast asleep.  He didn’t wake me when he got back into bed, which surprised me in retrospect.  I didn’t sleep deeply.  I couldn’t afford to, given the situation I’d grown up in, I’d learned to wake at the slightest sound.  Heck, sometimes just hearing my neighbors moving around had woken me up when I’d been living in an apartment.  Maybe it was because I’d been so tense, or so tired, or maybe it was just the hangover.  

I woke up late the next morning, most of the headache already gone.  Jack was fast asleep, sprawled on top of me, arms and legs managing to cover most of the bed.  His braid had mostly come untied, leaving his back veiled in a tangled mass of beautifully colorful hair.  Even with the windows curtained, the room had gotten pretty bright, it must be almost noon.  I had the day off, and the next day; I never used my vacation days anyway.  And Jack was still fast asleep.  

Most of the hair that had fallen out of his braid had dropped over his face and it fluttered slightly with his breathing.  He’d never put his shirt back on.  One of my hands lay stretched out on the bed and in his sleep, he’d brought his leg up, so I realized a bit belatedly that he had his thigh resting on my palm.  His upper thigh.  _Very_ upper thigh.  Okay, waking him up was probably a good idea.  

I reached up with my other hand to tap his shoulder and Jack stretched luxuriously.  He shook his hair off his face and smiled up at me, resting his head on my chest.  Luckily, he moved his leg, but he only moved it over to press it against my own leg, leaving him more or less straddling me.  

“Well you look adorably fluffy this morning.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “Fluffy?  Adorable?  Is that a compliment?”

He chuckled and pushed himself further up the bed, sliding the entire length of his body along my own.  Including his crotch.  It was a very good thing that I didn’t have to get ready for work right now.  “It is a compliment.  You look wonderful right now.”  He reached up to run a hand through my hair, playing around with the curls.  

I managed a skeptical laugh.  It was difficult, now that I was completely awake, to forget the corpse and everything else hidden in his basement, but Jack’s flirting was surprisingly helpful.  “Jack, I’m slightly hung-over, and I just woke up, I don’t exactly think I look my best right now.”  

“You think too poorly of yourself.”  He hopped up onto his hands and knees and kissed me before rolling nimbly off the bed.  “Breakfast?”  

So much for where I’d thought that was going.  “Probably a good idea.  I’ve taken today and tomorrow off, just so you know.”

*       *       *

“Great.”

Maybe I’d been wrong in thinking that he wasn’t interested in sex right now.  I’d woken up horny, but also ravenous.  Too late to back track now, we might as well eat first.  Downstairs, we got breakfast and both of us brought out our laptops.  I cooked pancakes.  I was good at cooking pancakes.  Usually.  

I ate faster than him, which was also typical and I didn’t really have much to check on my computer.  I didn’t want to start writing, because once I got started, that was usually an all-day thing and he was nearly done, so I loitered around the kitchen for a few moments and ended up walking back over to him.  I didn’t try to look at his computer screen, mostly I’d planned to kiss him and hopefully progress to sex once he was done eating, but I realized he was reading an online newspaper.  It was something like the New York times, although he’d already scrolled past the title, but it was global stuff, probably a sort of front-page, as web-news went.  A headline caught my eye.  

*       *       *

I wondered what Jack was doing when he froze, standing behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders.  Looking up, I found him reading an article on my screen.  I figured I could guess what article he was reading.  Amid the news of terrorist attacks and global political tension and a particularly long article noting that the current C.E.O. of Poseidon Energy had died of a heart attack, a small headline on the side of the page heralded Jack Valentine’s first novel to be classified as a romance rather than erotica to be an enormous success.  I figured it was something I should at least skim, considering I was dating the man, so I opened the article to read more and leaned back to see his reaction as it loaded.  “You don’t seem to get many mainstream reviews, do you?”

He shook his head distractedly.  “No,they don’t come often in my line of work.”  He skimmed the article at the same time that I did.  Apparently, this reviewer portrayed him as some sort of hidden talent, `wasted on porn’ and such.  Well, I don’t know about _wasted,_ he was an amazing writer regardless.  It still seemed just a bit awkward to know that I’d been unknowingly reading the erotic writings of the man I was now dating, like I’d been delving into his sexual fantasies or something.  That was almost as awkward as it was tantalizing.  

*       *       *

My publisher had mentioned that he might contact a friend of his to publish my latest book as a romance rather than erotica.  I hadn’t payed much attention to the email and frankly, writing had taken a backseat to my life.  It wasn’t as if I needed to earn a living at this point.  I’d told him as much in our last emailed conversation, still noting that I’d send him anything I wrote for pleasure.  I could tell he was disappointed— the man practically lived off greed— but he’d always been easy-going and he presumed, quite rightly, that I sacrificed my passion for writing only because living my life involved quite enough sex to inspire more best-selling porn.  He reminded me of Garret, in that regard.  

I hadn’t actually seen the article about myself, however, although Arcade seemed to think that was what I’d been so interested in.  No, frankly I expected to be successful in my writing and really didn’t care whether I was or not, now that I had the money I had.  Besides, I still couldn’t talk about what I wrote in public, even this newest novel was pretty explicit and the non-sexual elements of this romance got so brutally autobiographical that talking about it felt like invasive surgery.  I hoped Arcade never got around to reading it.  

The article that had caught my eye had been quite different, unrelated to me almost entirely.  The cover story for this paper detailed the sudden death of Poseidon Energy’s C.E.O., the owner of one of the most powerful companies in the world.  Whatever I led rapist policewomen to think, my mother did not run the company.  She did, however, work so closely to this man that I’d met him on many occasions.  He often attended formal parties at my family’s castle and he had actually gotten along with me quite well.  Several people had suspected that he’d been sleeping with my mother, but I knew that was not the case mostly because I’d become close enough with him that he’d once told me he was gay.  Not that _I’d_ been sleeping with him, for that matter; he wasn’t my type.  He knew my mother’s compulsive need to manage every detail and make sure things got done right and that was why he trusted her the most of his direct subordinates.  Her acronym was also C.E.O.: Chief Engineering Officer.  She managed the power company’s extensive engineering branch, ensuring the efficient design of everything from dams, to wind turbines, to solar panels and nuclear reactors.  It was part of why she traveled so much.  She wasn’t just an engineer, however, she had five masters in everything from management to nuclear physics.  Yeah, having a mother like that was one of the many reasons that nothing I ever did could impress my family so I’d stopped trying.  I had issues.  

His death seemed a bit strange, he’d been in great health as far as I knew, but the man didn’t exactly advertise his medical records to me.  I’d luckily read fast because the information I’d sought had been in the very last sentence and I’d barely read it when Arcade clicked to the review of my book.  I wanted to know who’d succeed him.  As I’d expected, his will had promoted the person he thought most capable of the enormous task: my mother.  

“What?”  Arcade was looking up at me curiously.  He still didn’t realize that I hadn’t been reading the article about myself, and I guess thinking about my mother had brought some emotion to my eyes.  I realized I was tearing up.  God, how could I still miss her so much after everything she’d done?  I wiped my eyes on my arm.  

“Nothing.”  I needed a distraction.  Anything to take my mind off that.  I paced back over to the kitchen.  “You said you’re off today and tomorrow, right?  Let’s do something... interesting.”

He smiled a little and walked over behind me.  His arms were around me in a hug before I realized what he was doing.  “You know, there are a lot of interesting things we can do here...”

~       ~       ~

From there, things progressed pretty much as one might expect.  

I dropped back onto the bed beside him, catching my breath.  It was nearly dinner time, starting to get dark outside, and we’d been going at it pretty much non-stop since breakfast.  We’d only made it up to the bedroom an hour ago and just gotten onto the bed for this session.  I felt proud to think that I’d nearly tapped out my pool of ideas, or at least ideas that didn’t require a setting, or objects, or more than two guys.  I didn’t _just_ write gay porn, although I personally had no interest in women, so those descriptions had been mostly guesswork and apparently accurate research.  Orgies, on the other hand, I’d never had, but could speculate on even more skillfully.  Maybe Arcade or Vulpes would be up for that at some point...  

Now _that_ was an idea to get me writing.  Maybe I’d suggest it for tomorrow.  

I scooted closer to him, wrapping an arm over his chest and pulling myself up to look into those beautifully green eyes.  He grinned back at me.  

“I don’t think I can keep up with you.” Arcade laughed, only half joking, “What was this, the...tenth time since breakfast?”

“Twelfth,” I chuckled, pausing to kiss him, “but who’s counting?”

“You know we should probably get groceries today.  I’m all for continuing this until we both fall asleep exhausted, but the idea of eating take-out for the next few days turns my stomach just a little, and there’s something I need to do tomorrow.”

I frowned curiously, hoping he’d explain.  Between him and Vulpes, I should have known better.  And yet Vulpes had been answering my questions and Arcade, whom I thought I could trust completely, remained a total enigma.  He was hiding something.  But so was I, only my secrets I kept because they were too painful to tell.  I didn’t think that was the case with his.  

Arcade hesitated for a long time, breaking eye-contact.  “I’m going east to...to see an old friend.”  I raised an eyebrow, hoping for more detail but not getting any.  Giving up, I sighed.  

“Alright, grocery store.  Do you have a list?”

He seemed glad that I’d dropped the subject.  “No.  Do you?”

I nodded.  In a particularly organized moment last night, I’d written a list while I waited for my succotash to heat up.  It was downstairs, taped to the fridge.  I didn’t have any magnets yet.  

Arcade read through it, adding as he saw fit while I ran another check for anything I might need to get.  We walked down to his car, me in a Flogging Molly t-shirt and jeans and him in tan slacks and a white button-up shirt.  Jeez, I should have considered my outfit more carefully, now he really looked like he was my father.  

The bed and breakfast down the street was taped off and swarming with cops.  I’d expected that.  Arcade hadn’t, and I saw him watching it curiously as we got into the car and drove off.  Luckily we were gone before the police could decide to ask us if we’d seen anything last night.  

One thing about sex was that it put me in a _really_ good mood, and that let me ride in the car relatively unfazed.  We drove to the same store as before, picked up a similar mix of items, with the addition of dog food, considering how quickly Rex had gone through that first bag.  He’d been underfed when I’d got him, and I’d fed him back up to a healthy weight.  

For the most part, Arcade manned the list, and that led to problems.  About halfway through, he paused, reading the next item.  “`Sarcasm’?  There is no way you wrote `sarcasm’ on the list— we have more than enough of that— so what does this say?”

I laughed, “One can never have enough sarcasm.”  I checked the list.  “That says lasagna.”

He raised an eyebrow.  “Lasagna?  How?  In what language is that an L?”

I pointed, “It goes up and then runs into the a...see?”

“Are you writing in runes again?  Your handwriting is worse than mine, and that’s really saying something.”

“Yes, the painter writes less legibly than the doctor.”  I chuckled and kissed him, which he clearly hadn’t expected.  But I was in a good mood.  

“You consider yourself a painter more-so than a writer?”

“I consider myself a lot of things.  I’m sort of a Jack of all trades.”  He gave me a look for that pun and I grinned, “Sorry.  I had to say that at some point.  It’s accurate enough.”

He nodded, admitting that much.  “You do seem to have quite a wide range of experiences.”

We finished our shopping, carefully balancing the array of items in our cart, mostly ensuring that the dog food stayed on top and didn’t crush anything.  He’d have to carry that, I guess; with my broken arm, I couldn’t lift it and unlock the door, but I could carry everything else in my good hand, holding the six or seven bags all together.  

The store was pretty crowded, with it being the weekend and all, so we waited in line, lost in an intricate philosophical discussion, until we were at the check-out and I started piling the items on the conveyor belt.  

Arcade snapped his fingers.  “Crap, forgot orange juice.  I’ll get it.”

I nodded.  I planned to pay anyway; one way or another, I probably had ten times the savings he did.  At least.  

He walked off to get it and I passed the rest of the items up to the cashier.  She was young, maybe a year younger than me or maybe less.  I guess she was pretty, but I wasn’t the best judge.  I smiled, but focused more on the food, contemplating in the back of my mind the many things I could do with Arcade after dinner.  

The girl smiled at me.  “I know.  My dad’s always forgetting things too.”  I looked up in time to see her laugh.  “ _Dads_.”  

I...wasn’t sure what to say to that.  For a lot of reasons.  

“You new in town?”

I nodded.  She was flirting, that much was clear, and I really had no idea how to react.  I could handle obnoxious women, I could handle Cass, who seemed more than tough enough to handle a blunt rejection, but this girl was nice and she seemed...fragile.  Not that I was any sort of emotional Rambo, not by any stretch of the imagination, but every way I could think to explain her misconceptions about me seemed harsh.  I stayed silent.  Unfortunately, that just seemed to convince her that I was cutely shy.  

“Hey?  Do you live around here?  Maybe we can go to the movies sometime?  I only work weekends, you know.”  

Arcade came back, orange juice in hand.  He picked up on my awkwardness right away.  And quickly realized why.  I guess the girl misinterpreted the way he looked at me and then her.  Deductions really weren’t her thing.  She blushed and went back to scanning the groceries.  “W-we were just..chatting.”

Arcade raised an eyebrow, a knowing grin creeping onto his face which the cashier, again, misunderstood.  “Riiiiiight.”

I’m still grateful that I managed to disguise my burst of laughter as a sneeze at that moment.  I couldn’t contain myself.  

Arcade and the cashier told me “bless you” at the exact same moment, though I picked up a very distinct note of amusement in Arcade’s voice.  He knew I’d masked a laugh in that sound.  With my terrible self-control, I was shocked that I managed to hold off my laughter until we were back outside, getting into the car.  My laugh was hardly a giggle, nowhere near high-pitched enough, but it had the same rapid and uncontrollable note to it as much as I tried to stifle it.  Arcade looked over at me, grinned and shook his head.  

“She thought I was your father, didn’t she?”

I nodded, finally managing to choke down my laughter.  “Yup.”

He chuckled as we got into the car.  At first I was smiling, but the car unnerved me.  She’d thought Arcade was my father.  For one thing, he wasn’t _that_ much older than me...was he?  Besides, I kind of liked that, and that disturbed me a bit just because of what little I knew about physiology suggested my attraction to older men implied.  I had daddy issues.  And in that vein, the very idea that she’d thought Arcade was my father reminded me of my real father and being in a car didn’t help.  The last of my giggles had started to become sobs and I fell silent.  I stared out the window as we headed home.  At a red light, I could feel him watching me.  

“Are you alright, Jack?”

I shook my head.  “Sorry.”

We didn’t say any more until we got home.  Out of the car, I felt better.  It was a beautiful day, the cops had gone, and the smell of jasmine cascaded down the stairs.  I took the groceries back and tried to calm down.  I needed a break, some time to relax and calm down where it wouldn’t bother me to cry, even though I knew Arcade had seen me at my worst and even though I knew it shouldn’t matter if he saw me.  I just felt better calming myself down alone right now.  Maybe one day I’d be able to do that around him.  I did trust him.  I trusted him more than I trusted anyone else right now, and I was more comfortable around him than anyone else.  But I couldn’t trust anyone completely right now.  I just hoped I could fix that.  Maybe a few more months living like this might do the trick?  Oh, who was I kidding.  

He hugged me, but I shook him off after a moment.  I could tell I was going to break down if I waited any longer.  “I-I’m going to take a shower.”

He gave me that gentle, knowing smile, the kind that showed how much he cared.  Damn, now I felt guilty for being so damaged.  He was a doctor, he had that caring expression down pat, whatever he said about not being a people person and despite the fact that he carried one of the largest pistols I’d ever seen.  “Alright.  I’ll cook.”

“Thanks.”  Hopefully I’d be back in the mood for sex by the time dinner was done.  I hardly expected my libido to disappoint me.  

*       *       *

While Jack was in the shower and dinner was in the oven, I called my friend.  Of course, he didn’t answer, but I hadn’t expected him to answer.  His assistant had his phone, phone calls just annoyed him.  They interrupted his work.  I didn’t have anything important enough to speak to him directly.  

He didn’t like changing assistants, but he’d recently moved.  That was part of why I wanted to be very careful about what I said over the phone, just in case.  A woman answered.  A young, scratchy voice.  A smoker, probably.  That was new.  No introduction, just a plain, slightly terse, “Hello?”

That I’d expected.  I didn’t give my full name.  My first name was rare enough that it could be mistaken for an alias anyway.  “It’s Arcade. I’m coming up tomorrow.”  She paused and covered the phone.  I heard a muffled conversation on the other end.  

“See you then.”  

She hung up.  It was quick, that was good.  We couldn’t risk saying too much over the phone.  I hadn’t mentioned that I’d be heading out there before, but this was important, it wasn’t a holiday, so he knew that.  I only came out there for important things and holidays, unfortunately enough, and he knew that.  All of us only interrupted his work for those two reasons.  We knew how he got about it.  

~       ~       ~

Jack came back down from his shower around the time that dinner finished cooking.  I’d never seen the man take showers that lasted less than an hour and I was pretty sure that, given his writing, I could guess why.  That was one of the many reasons that I wasn’t surprised when he came back down with nothing but a towel over his shoulders beneath his sopping wet hair and those incredibly distracting jogging shorts he’d worn the first night I’d met him.  He kissed me, glanced at the ten seconds left on the oven timer and went to feed the dog, which lay sleeping on a cushion in the corner.  Rex distracted him from me and dinner distracted us both.  

Jack looked back at the dog once we’d gotten our food and sat down.  Rex was asleep.  

“Do you know how old Rex is?”

I shrugged.  “No idea.  I was never that close with his owner.”  I had some of the chicken I’d cooked up and remarked, “You’re a vet, can’t you tell?”

He nodded.  “I have a range, he’s old, but not an exact number.  He still shouldn’t be sleeping this much.”

I looked at the German Shepherd.  He seemed to be sleeping peacefully enough.  I couldn’t tell his age, he wasn’t really gray in the muzzle or anything, and he seemed pretty lively when he was awake.  But he had been sleeping a lot as far as I could tell.  

“Do you want to take him to the vet?”

Jack shrugged.  “If he’s old, it could just be aging, but I think he might be younger than his teeth suggest, so I’m not sure.”  He paused to eat and think.  “If he keeps sleeping this much for the next few days or if I notice some other symptoms, I’ll take him somewhere.”

As if the dog understood him, Rex opened his eyes and sat up expectantly.  Pausing his meal, Jack got up to put him on his cart, letting the dog walk over to eat.  Having eaten, the dog patrolled the house a bit, let himself out and in, and then rushed back into the kitchen with one of his toys, a stuffed mouse, in his mouth.  Alternating between that and a red rubber ball, the dog clattered around the first floor of the house for the next hour.  That eased Jack’s worry more than a little.  

We took our time eating and talked long enough that Jack seemed to forget Rex’s odd sleeping habits and I nearly forgot my worry about the corpse in the basement.  And everything else in the basement.  

I went to wash the dishes, leaving Jack at the table as we continued our conversation.  Somehow we’d gone from socioeconomic policies to sports.  I shot him a curious frown as I started to clean.  “You _golf_?”

He laughed.  “I’m Scottish, from an extremely wealthy family, and more than half my aunts are doctors or nurses.  Of course I golf.”  He got back part of his accent just talking about that and then he got slightly wistful.  “Dad set up a course on our property.  I think the servants maintain it.”

“You have servants?” He shook off whatever memory had reared its ugly head.  “And they golf?  Somehow, I can’t picture you golfing.”

He didn’t laugh, but he managed a smile.  “You shouldn’t.  I’m terrible.  I golf par on a good day.  Do you golf?”

“I’m a doctor, it’s kind of expected of me.  I am _also_ a terrible golfer.”

“Good.”  He got up, striding over to me and dodging Rex as the dog clattered past him.  “Let’s never go golfing.  You play any other sports?”

“Do I look like I play sports?”

He grinned, standing close enough beside me that we were touching.  “You’re tall, muscular... frankly, you look spectacular.  But I get that you don’t seem the type.”

*       *       *

I could tell that that assertion caught him off-guard.  He actually blushed.  “I...I work out.”

I turned around to lean on the counter in a way that let me look at him without turning my neck as much.  With my height, it also let me rest my butt on the edge of the counter in a way that hopefully showed it off.  My libido had come back full force and I was determined to make sure that no more bad memories interfered with that.  

“It shows.”  I kissed him.  

He set the dishes aside and a playful smirk crept onto his face.  “Well you play sports, don’t you?  Or at least run?  With those legs...”

That grin...now he was just toying with me.  Luckily, I liked that.  Sometimes.  But two could play at that game.  And I was pretty sure I could win.  “I run, I walk, I ride horses.”

He kept that same grin.  “Lucky horses.”

I slid my weight back onto the counter, easing one leg up to rest my ankle on my other knee.  This, of course, slid my thigh against his ass quite intentionally, and it had the added benefit of making it more obvious that I was just a little bit hard.  “Lucky horses?  You’ve had quite a bit of time between these legs as well.”

“That I have.”  That enigmatic smile didn’t change.  The man could definitely keep secrets.  And hide his emotions almost as well as Vulpes when he wanted to.  Luckily his morals kept him from such whole-hearted deception most of the time.  But there was no way he wasn’t turned on right now, so I matched his grin.  

“You know, there’s just something about having something so big and muscular between my legs that I...simply can’t resist.”

That got him, luckily.  I was at the point that I couldn’t have toyed with him much longer.  He kissed me and I kissed him back, gripping his shoulders and steering him back to the couch in my living room.  He recognized what I was doing and let me steer him easily.  Now that I’d done this once, I had some idea what to do, or at least how to do it when I was actually dealing with another person.  I was more confident.  

I pushed him back, following him onto the couch.  I didn’t want to break the kiss and did everything I could to avoid that, pushing my tongue into his mouth.  Once we were both on the sofa, it became very difficult to keep my mouth where it was, and not just because I really really wanted to kiss my way down to his cock.  But I had other plans.  And it was very difficult to arch my back far enough to have a good angle on him without breaking the kiss.  

I’d been a little distracted; I didn’t notice that while I’d been positioning him, he’d been taking his pants off, and now he had me between his legs.  I didn’t want to have to move either hand from squeezing his shoulders, but I needed to actually pull my shorts down.  I compromised, reaching my right hand back to jerk my shorts down to my knees and sliding my left to grope his ass.  I was completely hard and, having expected things to go this way after dinner, I wasn’t wearing boxers underneath.  

He briefly broke the kiss when I thrust into him.  “Jeez, you’ve definitely gotten more comfortable with me.”  Okay, I guess I’d been a little rough with that.  Or more than a little.  At least he seemed more surprised than annoyed.  

I smiled, trying to pretend I’d planned to be that aggressive.  “I’ve certainly had enough reason to.”  I wasn’t sure if I was just referring to sex or not with that statement.  I kissed him again, letting him push his tongue into my mouth and tugging it gently with my teeth.  If he was alright with me getting rough with him, then I was going to get rough with him.  I’d quickly realized that I liked things that way whether I was giving or receiving.  

I hammered into him, the hand on his hips pulling him into my thrusts while my other hand slid up to stroke his cock.  I slid my thumb along his tip, trying to keep in mind what I would like through the haze of pleasure.  I was getting better at that.  I was also getting better at lasting, and slightly better at breathing, though I still had to break the kiss.  In between gasps, I kissed my way along his neck.  Getting to his groin was out of the question now, given where my hips were thrusting, but I could still reach his neck and chest.  I’d rather be french-kissing him.  

I’d never exactly been amazingly fit, at least not aerobically.  Horseback riding, even jumping, wasn’t particularly exhausting.  It wore out my legs, not my lungs, and the kind of leg work I did was sprinting short distances and walking, at a slow pace, for miles a day.  Neither really helped my aerobic fitness.  Sex, on the other hand, seemed to be doing the trick.  Not that one day made a habit, but I’d be quite happy to make it one.  

We managed to last almost an hour this time.  I think it was the feeling of my orgasm that finally pushed him over the edge.  As usual, I lay down on top of him while we both let our breathing and heartbeats slow back down.  

I hadn’t noticed until that point that the clattering of Rex’s cart had stopped.  The dog stood right beside the couch, staring and wagging his tail.  I wasn’t the only one who noticed him.  Arcade looked over at the dog and groaned.  “Did your dog just watch us have sex?”

“Probably.”  I sighed.  I had enough dogs that I was used to that.  Between Turing’s habit of hiding under my desk and my habit of jerking off, canine voyeurs happened often enough.  Besides, the reverse was more common.  My animals were practically exhibitionists, even neutered Turing.  The little terrier frequently approached me , started humping his dog bed, and maintained direct eye contact the entire time.  Besides, my family’s animals were mostly breeding stock and I’d been trained as a vet, one could only guide so many horse cocks into mares before animals just stopped counting for that kind of thing.  I bet gynecologists weren’t nearly as interested in vaginal sex for the same reason, but that was a bit different.  

That said, the idea of a human voyeur wasn’t entirely unappealing to me, not that I expected to be having sex where I’d be seen.  Rex was fine.  I swear the dog was watching us just because he knew it bothered Arcade.  Or at least distracted Arcade.  He knew how to get my attention, and I’m pretty sure the dog knew better than to beg for _my_ attention at this particular moment.  I kissed Arcade and kept kissing him.  Somewhere around the fifth kiss he seemed to forget about the dog.  

*       *       *

I hadn’t expected to walk in on them.  

Luckily, they hadn’t noticed.  I’d been distracted, another uncharacteristic miscalculation, and so I hadn’t heard them over the rattle of the dog’s cart.  I waited in the hall, debating if this news was really urgent enough to wait and inform Jack tonight.  For some reason I no longer felt like staying to tell him.  

I had heard of no specific plans, or at least no specific plans likely to pose a threat.  The doctor had off, which suggested that tomorrow would be spent similarly to today, meaning that Jack would have an inadvertent bodyguard, should Lanius make an attempt on his life.  Although if I had gotten inside unnoticed, Lanius’ men may pose a threat after all.  

Cato was not known for his loyalty to any specific man, only the Legion in general, so Lanius had little reason not to try to use him against me.  However, though loyalty never came into it, Cato respected me more than Lanius, and so, rather than openly act against either of us, he played along with what Lanius told him to do and informed me of the Legate’s plans.  And, as one of my better agents, he had found out quite a bit.  

Lanius planned to send men for Jack, initially seeking to capture him, but I suspected that he’d be tortured and killed after such capture, even if murder was not the explicit purpose.  Cato had also caught wind of some more secret plot to ambush Jack when he inevitably left his house.  Both of those were less concerning than the third and most enigmatic plot, which Cato had only heard mentioned by an annoyed Centurion who complained that three plans, especially one as risky as the third plan, seemed like overkill for one, stupid man.  Most of the Legion had a low opinion of Jack.  Writers and artists were hardly warriors, and although I wasn’t particularly impressed by him, I did not believe he was as weak as he seemed.  He’d killed more than one of my men, unarmed, outnumbered, and ambushed on that first night I’d seen him, and he still managed to surprise me sometimes.  It took more than an ordinary man to do that.  

It wasn’t just Lanius’ plans for Jack that I wanted to mention, it was also the expected but concerning knowledge that Lanius sought to work against me directly.  Cato had overheard several conversations suggesting that Lanius had plans to kill me.  Indirectly, of course, he was smart enough to recognize that openly attacking me would bring Caesar against him, I suspected that he would try to make one of my jobs end badly or otherwise disguise my death as an accident.  Perhaps, although I couldn’t imagine how, Jack had learned of this and thus warned me not to go to work later in the week.  I still hadn’t decided whether or not to heed his warning.  

It was after ten, and my warning was not that important.  I would come back to tell him tomorrow night.  _Late_ tomorrow night.

*       *       *

We must have had sex another five times before finally dragging ourselves upstairs.  All that had both of us so exhausted that we fell asleep almost immediately and I for one didn’t wake up until morning.  I couldn’t remember any of my dreams.  

I woke up when the sunlight was grey, roused by a familiar beeping that stirred an irrational surge of hate. I despised alarm clocks.  That was half the reason I’d slept through so many classes, that and my frequent insomnia.  Besides, alarm clocks tended to wake me in an awful mood and leave me like that most of the day.  I think I growled in annoyance, curling up a little under the covers.  To make my mood worse, it must have caught me at the low point of my sleep cycle.  With the way sleep became deeper and lighter in a specific rhythm, being awakened from the deepest point of my sleep just left me more exhausted and cranky.  

Arcade turned off the alarm and feeling him move made me realize that I was on top of him.  I was too irritated to wonder why he’d set an alarm, I hadn’t even opened my eyes.  Why the hell was he setting an alarm _this early_?  

He brushed my hair off my face.  Why did that make me just a little less pissed off?  Half out of annoyance and half curiosity, I looked up at him, probably scowling.  He smiled.  It wasn’t a smug smile, more...apologetic.  “My friend lives four hours away.  I need to head up there now, in case there...are delays.  You can go back to sleep, if you want.  Sorry for waking you up.”  

And why did that smile somehow manage to make me happy again.  Miraculous.  Fucking miraculous.  

I sighed and stretched again.  “Nope, I’m awake.  Where are you headed?”

That blank stare told me I wasn’t going to get an answer and just a little of my annoyance crept back into my mind.  But I had no right to call him out on keeping secrets.  

“Are you going inland?  Not south?  There’s a national park north of the city and I’d like to hike, if you’re going that way.  It’s not far, it’s not like I’ll have any idea where you’re going.  I don’t feel like hanging around here if you’re going to be gone all day.”  The corpse in the basement unnerved me, and the painting of Ven made me sad, and angry.  I just didn’t want to stay here alone.  Besides, I missed hiking.  Rex could take care of himself.  

*       *       *

Jack was disturbed by the stuff in his basement.  Probably the corpse.  At least that completely assuaged my fear that he was secretly a sociopath.  He was normal and incredibly vulnerable, and he might still have people following him.  But I really didn’t want him knowing where I was going, I couldn’t risk that.  ...but he might not really be able to figure out where I was going, depending on how far he wanted me to take him.  And I didn’t feel right leaving him here alone.  

“Where do you want me to take you?”  Jack crawled out of bed and dressed,  

“Muir Woods.”  

I knew of it.  I think I’d been there at some point, but didn’t really remember.  Oh, right.  Now I remembered: Johnson worked there as a ranger.  I tried to avoid it so no one would recognize the fact that we knew each other.  I nodded and got dressed as well.  “I can drop you off there.”  It was near the city.  And North, not East.  There was no way he’d know where I was going.  And if he told people I went north, or if anyone found out where I dropped him off, they’d be looking in the wrong direction.  That was helpful.  

I still wanted to get going early, for a lot of reasons, which meant a breakfast of cereal.  Jack had the same.  He also fed the dog.  

I guess he was tired, which wasn’t surprising.  We were leaving around six in the morning and he didn’t say much.  I was awake and used to having too-little sleep, but I wasn’t the chattiest either.  We hardly said a word as we ate and headed out.  He threw together a small backpack with hiking supplies.  I was glad to see that he at least had some forethought.  

I guess he was tired enough that he was alright with the car, he seemed less tense than normal and that let me focus on driving.  I didn’t mind driving, although the idea of doing it for hours wasn’t exactly exciting.  I guess I was a bit more tired than I expected, or maybe just more nervous about going to see a friend with a similar past to my own.  Either of us could give the other away; which was part of why we tried not to get together very often.  

Distracted as I was, I only noticed the car behind us when we were halfway to the bridge.  Dark gray sedan, no markings, slightly tinted windows.  Between the fog and the pre-dawn light, it was dark enough that I couldn’t see the driver, especially with the windows.  I told myself it was just paranoia for the first few turns.  Then they ran a red light to stay behind me.  I was being followed.  I had an unfortunate amount of experience with this situation and I guess, even as tired as I was, I was still a good driver.  I stayed in the last turning lane before the bridge until we were at the intersection, carefully pacing the bus and tractor trailer to my left and keeping half an eye on Jack.  He almost looked relaxed.  That was probably about to change.  When the light turned green, I veered left, merging onto the bridge and sliding in between the two huge vehicles, forcing the sedan to turn and ignoring the storm of horns that ensued.  With everyone now stuck in the traffic on the bridge, I watched the unmarked sedan vanish behind us.  And then glanced at Jack.  

He stared at me, frozen into the seat, so tense he was shaking.  This wasn’t a flashback, but he still looked as if a bomb had gone off.  I grimaced.  “Sorry, we were being followed.”

It took a few moments for him to recover enough to speak.  He relaxed a little, raising his shaking arms to brush his hair back from his face.  “By _who?_ ”

“No idea.”  It was true enough.  There were a lot of people who’d want to follow me.  It never occurred to me to think the car might have been tailing Jack.  

Jack said nothing more and my frequent glances showed that he didn’t stop shaking until we were technically in Muir Woods.  It was a redwood forest, actually pretty beautiful this early in the morning.  It was Monday.  The place was practically deserted.  

I stopped at the first parking lot.  “Is this a good spot?”  I had no idea where he wanted to hike, the park was rather large, so there were a lot of different trails and lots.  For all I knew, he might have looked up a map and picked out a trail, but knowing Jack, I suspected he was probably just going to pick the first trail he saw and wander.  

He nodded, forcing a smile although I could tell he was still at the point that he wanted to be out of the car at any cost.  “Yeah, this is good.”  He was out the door before he’d finished answering, and then he hovered, holding his bag and standing there with the door open to finish the conversation.  

“Are you alright?  Sorry, again.”

“No, it’s fine.”  As usual, it clearly wasn’t, he was still jumpy, he just wasn’t going to say anything because he understood why I had driven so dangerously.  

I sighed.  “Are you going to call a cab or something to get back?”

Jack frowned.  “I...I _could_ call someone, I was thinking maybe you could pick me up whenever you get back?  I mean, as long as you’re sort of going through the same area...”

Now he made me feel guilty again.  And I knew he wasn’t trying to.  “Jack, I’m probably not getting back here until six at night.  Maybe later.”

To my surprise, he perked up.  “I’m fine with that.  Whenever you get back, if you can pick me up?  I don’t mind how late it is.”

I eyed him skeptically.  “You’re just going to hike around here for twelve hours?”

He shrugged.  “Sure.  I have food, I have plenty of water, I have a book, if I want to take a break.  I’m happy to walk a lot.  This isn’t even that much, by my standards.”

“By your standards?  What, do you walk more than twelve hours on a regular basis?”  I thought he was just trying to make me feel better about picking him up so late, but then again, those legs might attest to that kind of exercise...  

He grinned.  “I’ll be fine.”  I think he wanted to kiss me, but refused to get back into the car to do so.  “See you in twelve hours.”  He walked off.  I hadn’t really noticed what he was wearing, but taking another look, I saw a tight t-shirt and some distractingly short shorts.  Not like the shorts he’d worn yesterday, but still.  Damn.  

Tearing my gaze away, I left.  Four hours there and four hours back, at least, on roads that were hopefully less crowded than they’d been the last time I’d gone to see my friend.  Well _this_ promised to be a fun twelve hours.  

*       *       *

The park was fairly deserted, but I still preferred to be a little more alone.  I liked nature best when I could pretend I was completely alone.  It let me relax and think while I walked.  Out in Scotland, solitude was a bit easier to come by.  Here, I probably hiked several hours until I found a completely deserted part of the trails.  By this point I was hungry and had my packed sandwich while sitting on one of the slightly damp and mossy rocks in this part of the woods.  Once I was still, I could better notice the wildlife.  Some birds, some insects, a couple lizards trying to sunbathe and doing push-ups on the rocks around me.  I couldn’t place the species.  

I walked for another several hours, circling through a few more populous trails before finding my way to a deserted picnic area that happened to be beside the main road.  My legs hurt, I guess my body was no longer as used to the kind of constant walking I’d done a few months ago, or maybe it was just the steep incline of the last trail I’d hiked.  

I stopped to read and soon enough I’d finished half the book I’d brought and my legs no longer hurt.  As amazing an author as he was, I usually couldn’t handle more than a few hours of Tolkien a day.  I stowed the book in my bag and walked on.  By now, the sun had dropped low to the west, but not entirely sunk below the waves.  It lit the misty woods in an almost mystic golden glow.  It was almost six, but I had my phone on and expected Arcade to text me when he got here.  Besides, according to the trail map, I was almost back where I had started now, even though I hadn’t seen another person for hours.  

I had last seen redwoods as a small child, so young that my only memory of them had faded to little more than a glimpse and the smell of the wood.  To walk among them again now, alone in this deserted section of the forest, I felt as if I had stepped through the looking glass, yet again, as I had when I had first climbed through the gardens around my new home.  In the chill of the coming winter, the trail I now walked was didn’t even show footprints and I could hear no sign of civilization at all, not even the cars on the road that I knew was behind me.  I let my imagination wander.  For a moment, I fancied myself a ranger, as in the fantasy novels I read and the few erotic fantasy works I had written.  Something about the idea of bow-hunting in a sunlit forest populated by handsome elves and fierce dragons set my mind at peace.  Then again, my own life had quite enough metaphorical “dragons” right now.  

Returning to reality, I studied the rich colors of the bark, the soft carpet of twigs and leaves, and the golden rays of sunlight filtering down through the canopy so very high above me.  I could paint this place, but I wouldn’t do it justice.  

My feet carried me along the trail, moving with instinctive silence.  The forest looked so serene that I wondered if I might glimpse some wildlife.  Maybe a deer, or a fox.  Maybe an eagle— an american eagle, not one of the sea eagles I was used to seeing.  Or an owl.  I studied the dappled sunlight for signs of motion as the trail rose along a hillside and approached a curve.  Maybe I could see another lizard, I mused, or a snake.  Or maybe a cougar, they lived around here, right?  Maybe.  Probably not a cougar, I corrected, but maybe a— 

Bear.  It stood in the path ahead, just around the corner, licking at a discarded yogurt cup.  The animal was huge, the hump on its back easily level with my hips.  The bears I had seen in pictures were bulky, almost adorably chubby animals, but this one looked scrawny.  Starved, I realized, probably desperate for prey, and oh look what just showed up right behind it.  The way the path curved, I hadn’t seen the bear until I had nearly collided with it, so even though I had halted at the sight, I could have touched it without taking a step.  Not that I wanted to.  

I must have surprised the animal because it reared as I froze behind it.  The thing towered above me, nearly twice my height.  I was pretty sure that I’d seen bears this big in zoos, but sturdy fencing and distance made a world of difference.  Grunting, the grizzly turned towards me.  Amid the thick mix of dark and light fur, I could see scars, though I didn’t look too closely.  The bloody holes on its snarling face where a lot harder to miss.  The bear’s head was a mangled and crimson mess, like it had been hit by a car, though the wounds were equally bad on both sides.  One eye glared wildly at me amid a swath of angry red while the other had been reduced to a gaping socket.  One side of the animal’s lower jaw lacked a lip, although its glistening fangs still jutted, sharp and secure, from a mutilated maw.  

Hoarse and barely audible, the beast roared, breaking my terrified paralysis.  Every nerve of my body screamed at me to run and I was not about to refuse.  I scrambled towards the road, ignoring the trail and dropping briefly onto all fours in my haste.  I trusted my sense of direction to get me to the road as fast as possible.  I wasn’t thinking clearly then, but my frantic mind still grasped that cars and people offered my best hope of survival.  

My mad dash had already saved my life for the first time that day, although I wouldn’t realize it until much later.  

The ground was softer off the path and it gave way beneath my every step.  I scaled the hill in a straight line for the road half by the luck of stepping on roots and half by wildly clawing at trees and bushes.  Behind me, the bear had dropped to all fours in pursuit.  Up the hill, I straightened up and bolted.  Leaves and branches slapped at my face and body.  I think I inhaled a bug as I gasped for air.  Okay, this was definitely too much nature for one day.  

I was fast, although I hated to run, so though I heard the bear behind me, even felt hot breath on my legs a few times, I managed to put some distance between me and it and reach the road.  I found a rocky cliff on the other side, barring me from more forest.  To my left, the road wound slowly away, empty for the long distance that I could see, and to my right it curved sharply, a blind curve.  My lungs burned and tightened, reminding me why I never ran.  I knew the bear wasn’t too far behind me as a wave of dizziness stalled my flight.  I couldn’t breathe.  I stumbled across the double yellow lines, pivoting to watch the bear as it advanced.  It must have fallen or stumbled.  Watching it now, I saw that it limped and it was much farther from me than it had been a few seconds ago.  

In my panic, I had forgotten one crucial detail.  This was America.  

A car from my right blindsided me.  Pain overwhelmed coherent thought and my memories devolved into a haze of sensations and images.  White paint and the shine of glass and metal.  The piercing shriek of straining brakes.  Impact.  A starburst of agony as the back of my skull hit the pavement.  A thousand swear words flooded my mind and a few got out in someone else’s voice.  Adrenaline made me a little more coherent at that point and I glimpsed a hazy face above me.  I half recognized both it and the voice, but couldn’t think to place either.  To this day, I’m amazed that I was still capable of raising my arm and forming the word, “bear,” even if I said it in a tone that suggested I was commenting on a mildly interesting cloud.  

My eyes closed of their own accord, much to my annoyance, and I have since pieced together that my savior and accidental assailant nearly fell over onto me when he saw the bear, but then drew a gun and shot it dead.  As it was at the time, I was merely aware of sudden pressure on various parts of my body, a scramble of movement, and a deafening noise, the likes of which I had never heard this clearly before.  Contrary to the situation, I felt peacefully sleepy.  I remember wondering how horror could be so soporific around the time that strong arms hauled me off the road and strapped me into a car.  I didn’t notice that I’d been moved at all until he started driving.  I could feel that the pace was both careful and frantic, alternately racing and slowing to a crawl.  It made my head spin and a part of me felt deeply ill, but the rest was just so exhausted that I found I couldn’t move the muscles to be sick.  I couldn’t open my eyes either, I noted lazily, or speak.  Someone was talking to me.  The voice was even, almost calm, but there was a note of panic to it and as it spoke, I heard it grow louder and increasingly high-pitched.  Calm down.  Take it easy.  I’m fine, just let me sleep.  The pain was constant, but I felt it as if through a veil and the closer I got to sleep, the farther it felt.  Just let me sleep.  Amid the shouting erupted the occasional bout of muffled swearing, and just as often a series of freaked out pounding on the car horn.  Please, person, just be quiet, I just want to sleep.  


	21. White Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hospital adventures...at least as much as sleep, lack of sleep, and nearly dying multiple times (par for the course, with Jack) can be considered adventures.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song by the Gorillaz.

At some point, I must have blacked out, because I woke much later.  My awareness returned like the incoming tide.  The first wave was the sense of pleasant warmth, followed by the red glow of afternoon sunlight through my closed eye-lids.  I was on a bed, my back propped up on pillows to hold me in a sitting position.  The bedding was soft enough, but a little scratchy compared to what I was used to, not that I cared.  The air smelled like disinfectant and cleaning solution.  Hospital, I guessed.  My skull throbbed with every sound and I felt something between a helmet and a bandage encasing it.  Five lines of agony cut my chest, shifting with every breath.  There was a faint sting on the crook of my arm along with the distinct feel of tape and plastic.  An IV, I realized uneasily, taped to my arm.  Needles disturbed me.  My body felt stiff and I shifted a leg, keenly aware of every scrape and bruise that flared to life along my body.  It felt like I’d gone under a steamroller, but I stayed silent to take stock of my injuries.  

From the glow through my eyelids, I had the sense that I was facing a window.  The brilliance stung my eyes even while they were closed, but I couldn’t stand being in a strange place and blind.  I started to open my eyes...

And instantly regretted it.  The radiance was like a knife to my retinas.  My eyes snapped shut and now I swore.  

With no family that had any reason to show up and no reason to believe that the few people I had met in this country even had a way of discovering where I was now, I had assumed that I was alone, but such was not the case.  

Someone closed the blinds and I heard them walk over to me before I risked opening my eyes.  The pain was just a bit milder, fluorescent lights and bleached-white blankets didn’t help.  

“Damn, it’s bright.”  

Someone held my hand and I let them.  Luckily, my right hand was about the only thing that didn’t hurt.  I think I’d curled around it reflexively because my arm was still broken, and maybe the sling had kept it out of the way.  I rolled my hand over and gripped his hand.  

It was Arcade, I knew that when he spoke, even before my squinting eyes adjusted enough to see him clearly.  He had that worried, forced-calm to his voice, the way doctors sounded when they were really concerned but trying to hide it.  “J— Do you remember your name?”

I sighed.  I knew why he was asking and it let me infer several things about my condition.  “Jack.  Arcade, I’m alright, but could we turn down the lights at all?”

I heard him relax, letting out the breath he’d apparently been holding even though I had my eyes closed again while I reflexively brushed my hair back from my face before realizing that my head had been shaved.  I ran my fingers very lightly over the bandage on my head.  

“What is this, a concussion...no, skull fracture, right?”

He rested the hand that I wasn’t holding on my shoulder, keeping the pressure very light.  “Yes.  Can you remember what happened?”  He sounded guilty.  Whatever had happened, he felt partly responsible.  I couldn’t remember.  

I started to shake my head and stopped, groaning as a wave of pain and nausea washed over me.  I think he was saying my name, hoping I’d respond so he’d know I wasn’t passing out or slipping into a coma or something, but I couldn’t heard him clearly.  Part of it was the pounding in my skull and sinuses, drowning him out, but I also realized that I wasn’t hearing him as loudly as I should.  My ears were clogged, crusty like blood or something had dried inside them.  That was worrying.  I knew what that meant, a skull fracture that had probably ruptured the membrane around my brain.  Probably a depressed skull fracture.  I was lucky to be alive, now more than ever.  

I focused on my breathing in the hopes that it would calm my stomach.  Head injuries could cause nausea and breathing might help that.  But it also let me feel the painful tug of five rows of stitches along my chest.  

“I can’t remember.”  I realized I’d cut him off after I’d said it and added, “Sorry, my ears are clogged.  I think there’s blood or...something in there.  How bad is it?”  

Another voice broke in before Arcade could answer.  An old man, one I’d never heard before.  “Well, somebody set a grizzly loose in the woods and you found it.  The thing damn near clawed your chest apart and ran you to the road, where Arcade hit you with his car.”  

The light was still on but my eyes had adjusted enough that I half saw Arcade wince and shoot him a look.  “Sorry, Jack.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose.  My head was pounding and my face was probably bruised, as was most of my body, but I couldn’t rub the back of my head.  I preferred the illusion of easing my pain to just soaking in it, at least right now, with this level of pain.  This wasn’t sharp pain or even focused pain, this was full-body pain, partly numbed by something from the IV, I guessed morphine.  It was usually morphine.  

“I...It was a blind turn, wasn’t it?  Not your fault.  Someone set a bear loose?  That was someone’s _pet_?”

Arcade felt my head.  I think he checked my eyes and probably glanced at the monitor I presumed was beside me.  There were generally heart rate monitors and such around hospital patients and I had so many bandages on me that I wouldn’t recognize if I did have wires and such stuck to me.  I probably had a little brain damage, just the sort that would heal in a week or so.  I had a skull fracture, likely from being hit by a car.  The back of my skull, which was bad.  I was disoriented.  I was also closing my eyes and falling asleep, however hard I tried to stay awake now. 

*       *       *

Jack’s stare lost focus and he passed out again.  The next few hours became a storm of worry that bordered on panic, just like the twenty-one hours before them.  Julie was lenient with me, she’d seen me more than often enough to know that right now I was too completely shaken and distracted to be a good surgeon anyway.  Actually, she stopped me from operating on Jack for that very reason.  I was so shaky that I couldn’t hold my hands steady.  When he first went into surgery to repair his skull fracture, and the cuts on his chest, and to stop all the bleeding, I’d nearly passed out because I was so worried about him.  I think I’d had a panic attack, it was a bit difficult to tell even in retrospect.  Luckily, Johnson had been the nearest ranger I could find.  He’d managed to keep me slightly less hysterical while he’d called for paramedics and had Jack flown to a hospital.  The man had the kind of sangfroid Rambo would envy, as did most of our friends from where he’d been.  Usually, I could stay almost as calm.  Hitting Jack with my car and subsequently seeing him pass out, blood pouring from his nose, ears, and the visible crack in the back of his head had completely blown any chance I had at staying calm.  It didn’t help when my minimal attempts at first aid confirmed that the blood contained cerebrospinal fluid, meaning that the depressed skull fracture had ruptured the membrane around his brain.  Even if he survived the skull fracture and ensuing surgery, infection could easily kill him, and with the placement and severity of his skull fracture, it became highly likely.  

I had almost calmed down when he finally woke up, but then he was out again after less than five minutes.  Logic told me fainting, worry told me a thrown clot or some other bleed.  Unfortunately, worry was right.  He’d thrown a clot in his skull, having scabbed after the initial injury.  Luckily, he was still in the ICU, so five nurses and a surgeon had him clot-free and stable in another painfully long twenty minutes.  

Five hours after that and I was running purely on my concern for Jack.  I don’t think there was adrenaline left in me and I noticed off-hand that I’d been awake for thirty-nine hours.  It was a new record for me, surprisingly, as it only beat the previous by three hours.  At this point I felt close to passing out, but I didn’t expect to.  I was staying awake by sheer willpower.  I wouldn’t let myself fall asleep until I knew Jack was alright.  After the first three hours, during all of which Jack had been in surgery, Johnson had sent Daisy a message about what happened.  He’d risked contacting her, but the wording had been vague.  Eight hours after that, Daisy had risked coming to the hospital and in another four hours, she’d told half the neighborhood.  Jack never left the ICU, he wouldn’t until he recovered enough that we at least knew he wasn’t going to bleed again.  As a result, I was the only one legally allowed to be with him and even that was questionable.  It’s not like we were married or anything, I had no legal connection to him, and technically only spouses and family were allowed to be with patients in the ICU.  Julie made an exception for me because I was also a doctor and because she’d seen first hand how much I cared about him.  She made an exception for Johnson because she saw how hysterical I was and realized that he managed to keep me somewhat calm.  While I was in the ICU trying not to pass out, Daisy, Gibson, both Garrets, Raul, Veronica, Cassidy, and, surprisingly, Craig Boone were downstairs in the lobby, frustrating the receptionist.  I don’t know how Daisy told the whole neighborhood, but I started worrying about exactly who knew Jack was here when Julie stopped by to mention that half a dozen young men had started loitering discreetly around the hospital.  I wouldn’t have thought anything was odd if it weren’t for the fact that every single man she described fit the descriptions of the men who had been watching Jack at the party.  

With one very notable exception.  Even as nondescript as he looked, I strongly suspected the sixth man to be that creepy journalist.  Especially when Julie mentioned that he’d been standing alone, slightly hunched over, waiting by the elevator of the ICU’s floor, in the one corner of the room that was not visible from the information desk.  

Unlike myself, Johnson, even with his experience, couldn’t stay awake quite as long as I could.  He dozed off some time that second evening, probably about twenty four hours after I had hit Jack with my car.  My own endurance gave out somewhere around nine that night and I fell asleep.  I didn’t remember falling asleep and only woke up when I heard a groan.  I’d been out around an hour, at this point I was reaching dangerous levels of exhaustion so I was surprised I even woke up for so quiet a noise.  

Jack was awake.  He looked like hell, but he was stable and conscious.  He even seemed coherent.  He sat very still, one hand shading his eyes.  Apparently, he was still sensitive to light.  

“Jack?”

*       *      *

“What happened now?”  My head throbbed and I could feel the pain of the cuts on my chest, but I was mostly numb.  They must have upped my morphine.  My eyes took a second to adjust so I could see Arcade as he answered.  

“How much do you remember?”  He’d been on a chair against the wall, but he stood beside my bed in less than a second, holding my hand again and resting his other hand on my shoulder.  He was worried, unsurprisingly, and he looked more exhausted than I felt.  

“How long was I out?”  He must not have slept.  Unbelievably, _I_ still wanted to sleep.  How long had he stayed awake?

“This time or in total?  Five hours, twenty minutes this time.”  

“How long in total?”

“A little over twenty six hours.  Do you remember anything about what happened?”

“I remember the damn bear, and being told I got hit by your car, I mean what happened medically?  Did I just faint earlier?”  He hesitated.  “Also, you look worse than I feel.  And I’m exhausted.”

That broke the tension just enough that he smiled.  “You have a depressed skull fracture and more cuts and bruises than I can count.  Aside from exhaustion, are you feeling alright?”  

“I’m coherent— I think— and you seem to have upped my morphine.  I’m fairly numb, just tired.  Why’d I pass out?” 

Again, he hesitated.  “You...you threw a clot.  And yeah, we upped your morphine.  You do realize that you have rather a lot of injuries...”  He yawned and pulled his chair over so he could sit down without letting go of my hand.  

“Arcade, you’re falling asleep.  And so am I.  Have you been here awake this whole time?”

He didn’t need to answer once I saw his guilty expression.  

I sighed.  “Arcade, you need sleep.  I’m also exhausted, can _I_ sleep?”

He yawned again, and I had to yawn in response.  “It should be alright, we have monitors so you don’t pass out or anything.”

“Then go to sleep.”  He started to protest and I stretched a little.  I really wanted to sleep, but I felt bad sleeping if he was still here, wanting to talk to me.  He needed sleep more than I did.  

Luckily, the old man woke up, and cut off Arcade’s protests.  “You’re going to make yourself pass out, Arcade.  Go home and get some rest, he’s out of the woods now.”

I grinned at the joke he hadn’t meant to make.  “Both literally and metaphorically.  Arcade, he’s right, and at this point I just want to sleep myself.  Go home.  I’m sure you’ll sleep better than I will.”

He raised an eyebrow, “In that house?”  Even falling asleep, he still had that wonderful wit.  I shrugged, admitting the truth- my house was terrifying.  I think he was going to protest, but at that point, Julie came in.  

“You’re still here?  Arcade, _both_ of you need to rest.  Get some sleep and let Jack sleep as well.”

*       *       *

Once Julie got involved, I had to relent.  She was speaking as a doctor more than a friend, and given that I knew there was no way I could have swayed her decision.  She was getting me to sleep if she had to tie me into a hospital bed and sedate me, and if Jack tried to stay awake or otherwise find trouble, I fully expected her to do so to him.  As sweet and gentle as the woman usually was and as much as I felt that her mind couldn’t even conceive a single violent act, she got things done when she wanted to.  It was how she managed to run the hospital as well as she did.  

Standing, I realized that I was actually so tired as to be somewhat dizzy.  I didn’t fall, but I had to stop for a moment and walk somewhat slowly down to the elevator.  I still kissed Jack goodbye before leaving.  Johnson joined me, though I didn’t know if he planned to stay with Daisy tonight or take a cab back to his house.  He lived well outside the city.  

At the elevator, I noticed the man Julie had mentioned.  Yup, it was definitely the creepy journalist, lurking in the corner.  He looked almost as tired as I was.  There were dark circles around his eyes and something about the perfect stillness of his stance suggested he’d locked his joints to conserve his energy.  He stared at me while I stood beside Johnson, waiting for the elevator to reach us.  I was tempted to ask him something if not for the fact that, given how tired I was, I couldn’t be positive that the journalist wasn’t just my hallucination.  I didn’t want to seem crazy by talking to him.  Right now, I just wanted to sleep, even if I would be sleeping in Jack’s horribly creepy house.  


	22. Night and Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once the healing starts, the hospital gets a bit boring. Unfortunately, life for everyone else is far from peaceful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got a lot longer than expected, as usual. There didn't seem to be a good stopping point so I had planned to continue until Jack was on his way out of the hospital, but that didn't happen, so expect the next chapter to be very short. Probably. I tend to be wrong when I say that. XD And sorry the update took so long, my life's been very busy lately.

As it turned out, James Garret was the only person downstairs sober and awake enough to drive anymore.  Entering the lobby from the elevator, Johnson and I were met with a storm of questions that we were both much to exhausted to answer coherently.  Daisy, realizing this, shut everyone up.  I guess she must have asked if anyone could drive me home because I clearly was in no shape to drive my own car.  Come to think of it, where was my car?  Johnson had driven us  to the hospital once Jack was taken there by helicopter; I guess my car was still in Muir Woods, badly parked and splattered with blood.  And had been for over a day.  I bet _that_ freaked out the tourists.  And pretty much everyone who didn’t know what had happened.  Which was pretty much everyone.  

Daisy had shepherded me over to Garrett, who had me in his car before I fully realized what was going on.  Off the constant adrenaline that had kept me coherent until I knew Jack was at least somewhat alright, I was falling asleep constantly.  I could barely keep my eyes open.  I got the vague sense that Garrett was saying something to me using the voice he used to talk to extremely drunk customers.  I think I remarked on this, but I’m not sure I was awake enough to make the comment make sense to him.  I fell asleep in the car and didn’t fully wake up when we stopped.  I guess I had just enough coherence to get up the stairs, into the house, lock the door, and pass out on the bed.  Thirty-six hours was way too long to go without sleep.  

I don’t know when I got back, so I had no idea when I woke up, but I had the sense that it was around five hours and I was still exhausted.  The house was dark, and silent.  I hadn’t thought to check on Rex, but I found the dog beside the bed when I woke.  He lay on his cushion, head up and ears pricked as if he’d heard something.  He sniffed the air.  

Five hours was definitely not enough sleep after how long I’d stayed awake, so I was still tired but awake enough to be worried by that reaction.  Alone in this creepy house, I didn’t trust the dog to have heard something innocuous.  But I hadn’t thought to change before I fell asleep, so I still had my gun on me.  The safety was on, it was hidden, and I had one less bullet than I usually did, but it was still a Desert Eagle.  

I lay very still for a moment, trying to hear any movement in the dark house.  Giving up, I got out of bed, one hand drawing my gun as I looked around.  The curtain to the studio was closed, as we’d left it, and the bathroom door was open, also as it had been two days ago.  I turned on the lights in both rooms and the bedroom, finding nothing.  The door to the stairwell was open.  I couldn’t remember if I’d closed it or not.  I tried to creep down the stairs but exhaustion didn’t make for great stealth and I was still too tired to move silently on the creaky wood floor.  I didn’t turn on the lights.  I must have left the light on by the door, because it was still on, but the rest of the first floor was dark, including the kitchen.  The glow of moonlight through the open windows in that room only lit enough for me to see the hallway beside the stairs.  The hallway towards the door before it reached the glow of the light, the small sitting area to my left and the living room were all pitch black.  At the bottom of the stairs, I leaned against the wall, staring futilely into the darkness as I clicked off the safety.  

Hearing the faint click, someone lunged around the corner and jerked the gun from my hands.  Thin but strong hands pried my fingers off the grip in what I recognized as a specialized technique typically taught in martial arts.  But that way of disarming me also meant that I knew exactly where his hands were and my gun was still pointing away from me, I wasn’t even sure he managed to catch it and even without my gun I wasn’t completely useless.  Not that I was much good with hand-to-hand combat.  

My first priority was to grab his hands, make sure he couldn’t turn my gun on me.  It didn’t help that we were both in the dark.  I caught one hand and felt the other grab my gun.  I fumbled for his wrist and forced his arm up.  He swept a leg forward, trying to execute a pretty standard take-down but with me holding his arms and my own quick-thinking to push him away by that grip, he only succeeded in throwing my balance off.  I hadn’t actually noticed until that point, but he was a lot smaller than me.  And stronger.  Jeez, I was starting to think that this wasn’t a fight I could win.  He had me off balance from the attempted take-down and as a result my next move was completely unintentional.  Stepping back in the hope of avoiding some other attempt to trip me but also trying to keep my balance, my foot hit the bottom step, stopping me short and causing me to stumble.  He took advantage of that and knocked me back onto the stairs.  I curled enough that my head and neck didn’t hit the stairs, but the impact hardly worked wonders for my back.  

With two clicks, the intruder had the lights on and my gun leveled at my head.  And I was sprawled on my back on the stairs.  And I recognized him.  

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“You are surprisingly uncooperative considering I am holding your gun.”  

I glared at the journalist.  He curled his finger around the trigger.  Point taken.  

“What do you want?”

He nodded up the stairs.  “Move.”

I obeyed somewhat grudgingly.  Hopefully, Rex would bite him if he followed me into the bedroom.  

The dog didn’t even get up.  He just watched silently from his bed.  This was the same dog who’d growled at anyone who went near his old owner?  Either he was sick, as Jack seemed to suspect or...

Or he knew the journalist.  Very well.  Which meant the guy had been breaking in here on a regular basis.  

The journalist tailed me into the bedroom, keeping my gun leveled at me the entire time.  He gestured at the bed.  “Sit down.”

I obeyed, reluctantly.  The idea that this man had been breaking in on a regular basis disturbed me, but that wasn’t all.  Jack had said he was raped.  Recently.  And he hadn’t reported it, or at least it didn’t seem that he had.  

I narrowed my eyes at the journalist.  “What exactly is your interest in Jack?”

Stalking towards Jack’s desk, he gave me the most unnerving stare.  “Interesting that you presume my interest is in Jack rather than yourself.”

Now I didn’t care that he had my gun, I glared, and if he hadn’t had my gun, I might well have punched him, if not outright shot him.  “You fucking raped him, didn’t you?”

He grabbed something off Jack’s desk and eyed me enigmatically, volunteering no answer.  

I presumed I was right.  That made me hate this guy all the more.  “What did you just take?”  

Again, no answer.  He drew his own gun, another Desert Eagle, almost as high-caliber as my own, but more extensively modded.  It had a silencer, I noted.  He aimed it carefully at me while he expertly removed the bullets of my own gun.  He pocketed them along with whatever he had taken from Jack’s desk.  “I would appreciate if you would be more careful with my friend, although I understand that his tendency to find trouble complicates matters.”

He tossed my now useless gun onto the bed beside me and I didn’t bother to grab it.  He kept his own gun still leveled at my face, and that was the only thing that kept me from attacking him.  “Your friend?  Oh, rape, what a lovely way to show friendship, can’t see why _that_ never caught on.”

*       *       *

The man was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to speak like that while I still held a gun to his head.  I trusted that his annoying ethics would drive him to keep Jack safe, but it made dealing with him difficult.  I was half tempted to pistol-whip him as punishment for such sass, but feared I might accidentally kill him.  Jack did, clearly, care for him, so in the hope of avoiding anything that might upset Jack while his was in so precarious a condition, I decided that it would be better to leave the doctor alone.  I kept my gun leveled at him and backed to the stairs, closing the door behind me.  

As soon as he was out of my sight, I heard him scramble for something concealed in the room, presumably reloading his gun.  I did not expect someone so cautious to only possess the bullets already inside the weapon, but I would be gone before he would be able to shoot.  Leaving the house, it occurred to me to wonder if he was right.  Technically, I supposed Jack had not given me consent for that initial...incident, before I recognized him, but he had clearly enjoyed it and never complained to me.  If he never said otherwise, I did not feel there had been any harm done.  

*       *       *

Once again, adrenaline staved off my need for sleep.  After digging out my spare bullets from my box under the bed and loading my gun, I searched the house, finding nothing.  I’d learned nothing relevant about the gun in the basement, or the generator, so I didn’t bother going down there.  At any rate, the bookshelf hadn’t been moved, so the journalist had left by the front door.  And locked it behind him.  He had a key.  _Great_.  

I shoved the dresser in front of the door to the stairwell, not really expecting it to stop him but at least it set my mind at ease.  I worked tomorrow and there was nothing else I could do tonight.  I went back to sleep.  

*       *       *

Hospitals always unsettled me just a little.  Yes, I had a doctor fetish, and yes, hospitals made a great setting for porn, but I’d had a lot of bad experiences with the places.  I was initially too tired for this fear to keep me awake, but that ended around five in the morning.  The room was dark, only illuminated by the moon through the open windows and the fluorescent lights in the hallway outside the door.  I was still somewhat tired, and more than a little disoriented.  Between the morphine and the throbbing head injury, I barely noticed that I’d been moved to a different room.  This wasn’t the ICU, not that I could recognize what else to call it.  The hallway was silent, the building practically dead from the lack of sound.  In a moment of complete amnesia, I looked around for Arcade and found the room empty.  Four empty chairs lined one wall, awaiting visitors, and though none seemed recently in habited, one had been pulled forward to rest a bit closer to my bed.  That wasn’t all.  As my eyes adjusted to the dim light and I took stock of my surroundings, I noticed one object on the mostly barren bedside table: a stone stallion.  That one that Vulpes had given me eleven years ago.  

He had been here, I suspected.  He’d probably moved the chair and left before anyone else could show up.  Uncomfortably alone in this creepy hospital room, the idea made me smile.  I took the horse off the table and lay back down, squeezing until the stone felt as warm as my skin.  I managed to fall asleep again and didn’t wake until late in the evening.  I guess I needed the rest.  

*       *       *

After all that worry and adrenaline with Jack, I wasn’t surprised when I slept until three in the afternoon and almost missed my alarm.  I hadn’t slept well either; after being held at gunpoint by that creepy journalist and without Jack here beside me, my nightmares had returned full-force.  Actually, more than full-force, these were nearly as bad as they had been when my mother and I had been on the run in my childhood.  I woke up somewhat groggy and annoyed by my alarm and lack of restful sleep.  I sighed.  I wanted to get in to see Jack, ideally both before and after work, and I’d probably spend my breaks in his room, but that also meant that I had a grueling twelve hour shift to be followed and maybe preceded by more time spent in the hospital.  Even with Jack, I wasn’t fond of the place.  I spent more than enough time there.  Helping people was all well and good, but lately there’d been a lot more who were either set on getting themselves right back into trouble or beyond our power to save.  Still, I did what I could.  I just didn’t exactly enjoy the futile cases.  

I sighed, realizing that I was already running very late and would probably have to eat on the road, or at the hospital cafeteria.  

Realizing that I was awake, Rex whined and scooted over to the bed, looking up at me.  I sat up to get my glasses and phone and looked down at the dog.  He whimpered softly.  

“Are you worried about Jack?”

Rex barked.  

I guess that was a `yes’.  “He’s going to be alright...it’s just going to take a while.”

Rex picked up on my worried tone and whined again, tilting his head at me.  

“I can’t really do more than I’m already doing for him, Rex.”  I got up, getting ready as quickly as I could manage while the dog trailed along behind me.  I took care of him too, hoping I fed him the right about and wasn’t forgetting anything.  I might have to ask Jack, two days did not exactly make me an expert at dog care.  Then again, I guess, as a doctor, I was decently skilled at people care so it shouldn’t be too difficult to tend to the dog.  I felt a little guilty leaving him alone all day, but couldn’t see any alternative, so I headed out.  Rex followed me to the door and whined when I shut it.  I guess he was still worried about Jack.  

As soon as I stepped outside, I could see a column of smoke in the city and hear distant sirens.  I sighed.  I guess today was going to be another massively busy day.  Walking down the stairs, I realized that I hadn’t checked my phone and took it out of my pocket.  With that amount of smoke and sirens, I fully expected to have missed one or two calls from Julie, if not from someone else as well.  I was wrong.  I’d missed no less than seven calls, three from Julie, two from Garrett, and two from Daisy.  After everything that had happened since I’d dropped Jack off in Muir Woods, my phone had died and been off and charging overnight.  Julie had left three increasingly desperate apologetic voice mails begging me to come in early because the current hospital staff simply was not enough to handle what had happened.  Garrett and Daisy both wanted to know if I was okay, first after what had happened with Jack and second after what had happened in the city.  Apparently a building had collapsed.  

Garrett had just called very casually, asking if I was alright, reminding me that I could stop at his bar if I needed to talk or drink and marveling, using a wide array of profanity, at the idea that a skyscraper would collapse in this city, and not even from an earthquake.  Daisy was more thoughtful, asking if she could do anything to help while I visited Jack in my free time.  Actually, there was.  I worked twelve hour shifts and would probably be gone much of the day; it would help if somebody could watch Rex.  But I didn’t trust Daisy alone in that house, for a lot of reasons, although the break-ins ranked the highest on the list.  However tough she had been in her prime, she just wasn’t a match for that journalist if he showed up.  That said, there were others who might be.  Lily would practically destroy the place if she got into a fight with that guy, and I really didn’t trust Cassidy to behave herself, but Veronica could probably be trusted, assuming she’d be willing to help.  

I called Daisy, Garret, and Julie back, explaining that my phone had died, thanking them for their concern and informing the last that I’d be in as soon as possible and just got her messages.  My car was still in Marin, so I called a cab, hoping I’d have time to retrieve it tonight.  

I asked the cab to meet me at Levi’s Plaza, down the hill, hopefully skipping some of the steep and winding roads and getting to the hospital a bit faster.  I suspected that it wouldn’t arrive until I was already down the stairs and actually, I got to the plaza well before it did and had to wait on a bench by the bird-infested fountain until the cab arrived.  

When the cab finally showed up, it was driven by a middle-aged balding guy who kept grumbling to himself when we weren’t directly speaking.  I suspected some kind of schizophrenia, but didn’t want to mention it to him in case he was just on LSD or something.  Not that that made him the best choice of cab driver.  I really just wanted to get to work, and didn’t seek some alternative in the hopes that his muttering was just the product of pent up rage I didn’t want vented on me.  I still took note of his name on the cab’s info.  Chris Haversam.  Well, hopefully he was less crazy than he seemed.  

I got into the cab and let him drive once I told him where I was headed.  In the cab, I caught the gist of his angry mutterings as he detoured around the disaster zone.  Apparently, he was upset that someone had let him believe that he was a real life zombie.  

...Okay, that was one I hadn’t heard before.  

At least he spoke nicely enough to me when I paid and left, but I didn’t spend any more time than I had to in that cab.  Besides, I could smell the ash from the moment I left the car and heard at least another two ambulances rushing patients to the ER.  Seeing if Jack had been moved from the ICU probably wouldn’t happen for a while.  

*       *       *

Even with all the other times I’d been in the hospital and nearly died, I never remembered being quite this exhausted.  After another fifteen hours of sleep, I woke up tired.  I must have really been seriously injured to sleep this much.  Although, as I realized once I woke up, I didn’t really have anything to do, sitting here in the hospital.  Between the IVs and everything, they clearly didn’t want me getting up, which seemed pretty typical as my head injury meant I might pass out if I stood and I’d probably be dizzy under the best circumstances.  There was a TV, but TV always made me restless, and at the moment, my room seemed empty, so I had no one to talk to.  

Paying more attention to my surroundings, I noticed that the hallway outside was nearly silent, as if the bare minimum staff remained in this part of the hospital.  That seemed a little odd for the mid afternoon, a nagging instinct told me that something was wrong elsewhere, and the doctors and nurses had all gone to the ER and ICU.  I figured I was probably just being paranoid.  

Bored and wishing I had my laptop, or at least some paper and a pen, I turned the stone horse over in my hands, studying it out of habit as I had done countless times before.  

“Why is the carved horse significant?”

The voice startled me.  Looking around, I noticed the man who had driven me home after I was briefly enslaved.  It took me a second to remember that his name was Alerio.  He’d been standing beside my bed, leaning against the wall in a way that left him almost completely hidden from my peripheral vision.  I craned my neck to look up at him.  

“I didn’t expect you to visit.”

“I am under orders to ensure you are safe.”  Under orders?  Presumably from Vulpes.  He was concerned about me?  Well, he had mentioned this sort of thing, but why did he feel it was so serious that I needed to be watched all the time?  I felt like this relationship was a lot more dangerous than I had previously realized.  

“He gave it to me.” I answered vaguely, figuring he’d either ask for more detail, make an assumption, or figure it out himself.  Between wanting conversation and feeling like I shouldn’t openly talk about my relationship with Vulpes, I didn’t care which he did.  

Alerio hesitated as if afraid to ask.  “Do you mean your doctor friend gave it to you or...?”

“Vulpes.”

“What about foxes?”  I had made sure he was trailing off before I answered, so I don’t think that Arcade had heard anything but my reply when he walked suddenly into the room.  I didn’t need to fake the smile I gave him.  I still didn’t want to explain what I’d been talking about.  

“I was just talking about what little Latin I know.  It’s mostly animal names for obvious reasons, and the word for fox slipped his mind.”  I got the sense that Alerio was somewhat thrown off by my absolutely instant ability to fabricate a lie  and tell it so convincingly, but he kept his expression remarkably natural.  

*       *       *

With such a quick response and with that utterly disarming smile, I have to admit that he almost fooled me.  Which made me all the more unnerved when I realized Jack was lying.  For one thing, he seemed to have just come up with that and I could still barely tell that he wasn’t being truthful.  He completely suppressed the normal tells as if he’d been lying all his life.  Maybe he had.  The thing was, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he’d want to hide that would involve the Latin word for fox.  Unless he was speaking in code.  Somehow, I doubted that, but if he could lie this well, maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought.  I didn’t want to believe that could be true.  

I tried to push the idea out of my mind.  I tried to change the subject.  

Ignoring the creepy guy lurking beside Jack, I sat down on the other side of the eccentric scotsman.  That visitor looked normal enough, though I had the sneaking suspicion that he was another of the men who’d been watching Jack earlier.  He said nothing, as if by remaining still and silent I might forget he was even there.  I didn’t let him out of my sight, but I tried to ignore him.  If Jack was being watched even in the hospital, maybe I had the wrong idea.  My instincts still said these guys weren’t friendly, but if Jack hadn’t been hurt yet, even while he was so vulnerable, maybe they weren’t looking to kill him.  Not that I thought even for a second that their intentions might be benign.  They were defiantly bad news.  

“Are you feeling alright?”

Jack laughed.  “`Alright’?  Hardly, but I’m about as comfortable as I can be right now.  Did you actually get a decent amount of sleep?  If not, I fear for your patients.”

“Yes I did, no thanks to that journalist.”  The awkward tension instantly returned, though I didn’t really get why.  Both Jack and the stranger he’d been talking to looked suddenly uncomfortable.  Was the journalist somehow connected to the men who’d been watching Jack?  The idea worried me almost as much as the thought that what I knew of Jack’s personality had all been a facade, but it would explain why he kept breaking in.  What exactly was going on with him, anyway?  If I wasn’t already so busy between work and Jack, I would really have focused on getting to the bottom of whatever had creepy young men showing up at Jack’s house at all hours of the night.  And, while I was at it, figuring out whose gun, C-4, and crucifixion victim had been left in the basement.  

Jack frowned, completely failing to hide his reaction this time.  “He broke in again?”

“Apparently, he has a key.”

Jack stared.  “What?!  I swear I had nothing to do with that.  How’d he get a key?”

Okay, now it was my turn to frown, and I was even more suspicious.  Why did he immediately think that I was accusing him of giving the guy a key?  Guilty conscience?  

Wait.  No, that made more sense for a different reason.  He _had_ been raped by that fucking journalist, now I was certain.  It made sense for him to freak out like that if that was the case.  And, if he’d been raped once, given the way that journalist kept breaking in so frequently, who knows what else he’d done to Jack.  This might be Stockholm Syndrome for all I knew, with the way Jack seemed perfectly alright having the guy break in at all hours of the day and night.  

*       *       *

He held my hand, apparently failing to notice the stone horse I was still holding in my more mangled left fingers.  He gave me that adorable concerned look I’d been getting a lot from him lately.  It would have been annoying if it didn’t leave me completely unable to be angry with him, which was also a bit of a problem.  God help me if he ever realized how completely he could control me with those puppy-dog eyes.  He was fucking adorable.  

Although it was somewhat more concerning that I had no idea what I’d done to provoke this bout of concern until he explained.  “Jack, it’s alright, I never thought you _let_ him inside.  Just change your locks, hopefully that will help.”

I was beginning to pray for a change of subject so I wouldn’t need to keep testing my dangerously untested ability to lie to Arcade, and lo and behold, one waltzed through the open door.  

Cassidy walked over to the foot of my bed, clearly already drunk.  She reeked of booze, and as much as I usually associated that with depression, the woman was grinning almost smugly.  “Well, look who’s finally awake!  Lucky you’re in here, a building blew up downtown and knowing you, I bet you would have been there.”  She pulled a bottle of whiskey from her pocket and held it out to me.  I don’t think she realized that I’d have to sit up to reach it and sitting up with the stitches all over my chest was a very bad idea.  “I brought you a drink.”  

I grinned awkwardly, “Thanks, but no thanks, I don’t drink.  Good to see you, though.”  

Cass narrowed her eyes.  “Yer too cute and well-hung not to drink.”  She stepped forward and held the bottle closer to me.  “Here, live a little.”

I waved the bottle away, feeling awkward for more than one reason.  Yes, alcohol turned my stomach, but I hadn’t tried it at all before my father died.  My massively alcoholic father.  I had always associated the smell and taste with him, and I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that my reaction to drinking could be entirely psychological.  I didn’t really believe that I just had a food sensitivity and even if I explained that the taste made me vomit, I doubted Cass would accept that.  I’d need to give her the full explanation before she’d back off with this, given how drunk she was, and then everyone in the room would regret her having asked.  

*       *       *

I saw that haunted look coming back to Jack’s eyes and blocked Cass’s next shove of the bottle with the back of my hand.  “Cass, he doesn’t drink.  Besides, the alcohol could cause a lethal reaction with the antibiotics he’s on.”  Which was completely a lie.  Jack was, admittedly, on more antibiotics than any other patient in this ward right now— which wasn’t surprising as the vast majority of patients were in the ICU and most here were elderly folks and cancer patients slowly dying.  This wasn’t the ICU and this wasn’t a ward for mild conditions, the patients here were heavily monitored, but not under the kind of constant supervision needed in the ICU, which meant that most were beyond help and dying and the other one patient, that patient being Jack, was being carefully monitored for any signs of infection or bleeding.  With the severity of his skull fracture, he risked infection in his brain and such an infection could easily kill him, we had him on antibiotics for that reason, a lot of antibiotics.  The antibiotics could never react to alcohol, which Jack almost certainly knew, not that the morphine didn’t make it extremely dangerous for him to drink.  I knew he didn’t want to drink and I doubted that Cass would know anything about medicine; that was why I went with the obvious lie.  

From the subtly grateful smile Jack gave me, I figured he knew I was lying, and from Cass’s accepting shrug, I knew she didn’t.  

“You doctors are no fun.”  She sat down and opened the bottle she’d been offering to Jack, taking a long gulp of it herself.  The woman was a shameless alcoholic.  

We talked until my break was over, me and Jack ignoring the man lurking on the other side of Jack’s bed and both of us apparently figuring that Cass was just too drunk to notice him.  It turned out that that wasn’t the case: when I left to go back to work, she followed me into the hallway.  

“So who’s that creeper by the bed?  Friend of his?”  

I shook my head.  “Have you noticed anyone around Jack’s house?”

She narrowed her eyes.  “Aside from you two, you mean?”

I nodded, just a little impatient with her sarcasm.  I know that was hypocritical, but I’d just spent several hours frantically trying to save the hundreds of dying people pouring in from the building collapse and I was on my way back to continue that depressing work.  “Yeah.  I think someone’s watching him, that guy just confirms it.”

“Why?  I mean, he’s hot, and between his crazy luck and that massive dick...”

“Wait.  How exactly do you know _that_?”  

“I found out he was wearing boxers at the Halloween party.  Some really tight boxers, too.  He’s good at hiding ‘em, but I got a good feel just to find out.  You’re a lucky guy.”

I rubbed my temples and sighed.  “Really?  You _groped_ my boyfriend that extensively?  You’re...inexcusable.”

She grinned.  “You bet his fine ass, I am!”

There was just no dealing with her.  My reply was entirely rhetorical and muttered under my breath as I headed back to the ER.  “God damn it, Cass...”

Back in the ER, I rejoined the hoard of doctors frantically trying to stabilize the dying workers of the city newspaper as well as the dozens of bystanders caught in the blast and subsequent devastation.  Somewhere amid the chaos, I found myself waiting for the elevator back down from the ICU and when the doors opened, I found Julie inside.  

“Are you alright?”  I must have looked vacant or something, because she sounded more concerned than I’d expected.  

I nodded.  “Jack’s...doing alright.  As long as he doesn’t get an infection.”

“Well, that was _part_ of the reason I was asking...”  She kept those sympathetic eyes locked on me.  

“We’ve had a lot of bad cases lately; I’m used to the rest.  I’m fine, Julie.”

“Alright.”  I knew she knew I was lying, it bothered me.  A lot.  But I wouldn’t be a doctor if I didn’t think I could handle it, even though things had never gotten quite this bad before.  Although the building had been the newspaper skyscraper, and that raping journalist did supposedly work there...but as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t actually bring myself to hope that he had died in this.  No one deserved this kind of death, not even him.  

The elevator arrived at the ER.  As I headed off to find my next patient, Julie added quietly, “You will tell me if it starts getting to you, won’t you?”

I turned my head but didn’t actually glance back at her.  “Yeah.  Sure.”  I hated how convincing it sounded, even to me.  

*       *       *

Jack was not alone when I arrived to speak with him.  I expected Alerio to remain beside him, watching to ensure than an attempt on Jack’s life did not succeed, as this last one nearly had— though not by the intended method— but I had not expected the woman to be there as well.  This was the red-head woman who frequented the mechanic’s shop and the Wrangler.  Cassidy, if I recalled her name correctly.  She looked up when I arrived, narrowing her eyes.  I barely needed to step into the room to know she was drunk, but I would still need to maintain my cover persona in her presence.  I smiled and ignored Alerio, taking out a journal under the pretense of writing notes for an article.  

“First a gang, and now a bear and a car in the same day!  Are you really that desperate to see me?”  Jack laughed, although Cassidy seemed perhaps more suspicious at that remark.  I held out a hand to her.  “Todd Acerbi, journalist with the Chronicle.”

She raised an eyebrow.  “Shouldn’t you be dead downstairs, if that was true?”

To my great surprise, Jack frowned.  “Dead?  Why?  What happened?”

*      *       *

Arcade hadn’t mentioned anything, but I realized now that today was probably the day I’d dreamed that Vulpes’ office would explode.  And apparently he’d taken my advice not to go in to work.  That really surprised me.  I’d had no proof, none at all, just a gut feeling and a wild premonition that he should be nowhere near his office today, and yet he’d believed me.  Vulpes had heeded my completely absurd warning.  

I wanted to ask him why, and I still had half a dozen other questions— about why he was having me watched, about what had happened to his office, about the gun and C-4 in my basement, and about why he had chosen crucifixion rather than a simpler, less conspicuous method of murder.  None of which were questions I felt I could ask while Cass was in the room.  But the woman had already had three bottles of whiskey and she seemed tired.  Even if she didn’t head home soon, she’d need to go to the bathroom.  

Vulpes either drew the same conclusion, or he chose to bide his time.  He sat in the other visitor’s chair, taking notes on a neat little book and questioning me softly as if he planned to write an article.  Fair enough, a bear attack _did_ warrant some level of notice, and if he released my real identity in the article it might be even more newsworthy now that my writing had branched out into “romance” and hit the bestseller’s list, but if the Chronicle’s office building had been bombed, as Vulpes briefly explained, then he was probably one of the last surviving writers for the paper.  Surely, with that kind of workload, he’d write some grander article, such as one about the bombing itself rather than my little accident with the grizzly.  He could afford to be selective if he was pretty much writing the whole paper himself.  I highly doubted whoever owned the paper would have been killed in the bombing, but I might be wrong.  Maybe he was just out of a job now and had nothing better to do than hang out here.  

Which meant, either way, that he had special interest in me.  If I’d just lost my job— assuming I didn’t have too much money to care about my state of employment— I’d probably alternate between frantically whoring out my resume and looking for sex.  If Vulpes had lost his job today, he’d come straight to me.  Now, there was that microscopic possibility that he was actually concerned about me and was just using his profession as a mask for compassion, but I highly doubted that could even happen, knowing what I knew of the once-sweet Russian.  Not for the first time, I wondered what sort of hell he’d been through to change him so drastically.  I was sure that I wasn’t the happy, trusting little boy I’d used to be either, not by any stretch of the imagination.  

But if he wasn’t here out of concern, why was he here?  Why had he come straight to me if he had just lost his job?  Because he knew I’d be bored?  Yes, that was obvious, he’d also be bored and restless if he suddenly found himself completely unemployed, but I suspected that he still had more than a few plans to take care of in his work with the Legion.  What little I had seen while enslaved suggested that he held great rank there; he probably organized some of their largest schemes, he was certainly brilliant enough to do so.  And they seemed to be working towards even more ambitious goals, judging from the amount of C-4 in my basement.  I wondered, vaguely, if he had engineered the destruction of his own office, but if that was the case, my premonition didn’t really make sense to me.  He was still more free than before, if he had just lost his job, and I knew what I would do in that situation, but he had to realize that with the back of my head essentially held together with nothing but stitching and bandages, I wasn’t physically capable of sex right now.  

Which left the other option, that he still had his job as well as a massive increase in workload, but for some reason he was here anyway, reporting on what had happened to me because it held some other interest for him.  For the first time, I recalled that he had known about my wealth from the start and I realized what that might mean.  There was a chance that he had only begun this relationship for my money.  I didn’t want to believe that and I wasn’t sure I really cared, or at least that was what I told myself.  I had never really expected him to _love_ me, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted love from someone so dangerous, but I didn’t want this to just be about money.  I had the money to give, and I probably would, for him, but I wanted more than that if I was in a relationship with him, even this weird screwed up thing we had now.  But he was here, in the hospital with me, when his day job had just been blown up and I didn’t know his motives at all.  I didn’t have any idea why he’s even believed my ludicrous assertion that his office would be blown up today, I would have completely understood if he’d ignored, or even laughed at me for that stupid warning, and yet he’d stayed away, heeded my warning, and he was alive for that trust.  What the hell.  Who was I to be trusted for saying something so ridiculous, so unfounded, and having not even a ghost of proof?  Who was I to be trusted at all?

I stared into those oddly grey eyes, grey like a whiteout in that insanely cold Siberian winter.  It was like that blinding storm remained even if everything else connected to the boy I’d known was long gone; I had no idea what he was thinking and he seemed just as cold and lethal as a Russian blizzard.  I’d gotten into this relationship because it was simple.  I didn’t expect it to be based on emotion beyond lust and fear.  This was rape progressed to friends with benefits, except it was also something more, somehow, something I’d never expected.  Was it possible that this incredibly dangerous man actually had feelings for me, maybe even loved me?

He remained an enigma, watching and waiting as he asked me about the bear attack.  Sure enough, Cass couldn’t supervise us forever.  Ignoring Vulpes to the point of cutting him off, she looked at me and asked, “You think you can handle yourself here without me?”  She glanced pointedly towards Vulpes and I nodded.  

“I’m fine, Cass.  Thanks for dropping by.”

She gave me a look like she didn’t quite share my confidence and eyed Vulpes with a mix of lust and warning.  “You touch one hair on his bandaged head, and I’ll ram that notebook so far up your ass that you’ll be spitting out paper mache.”  

Vulpes smiled.  “That would be rather difficult to do as his head was probably shaved for the surgery.”  He sounded pleasant enough, if subtly condescending, but the tension in his muscles suggested such a lethal annoyance that I half expected blades to flash and render Cass a mutilated pile of body parts.  Even if I couldn’t see any knives or machetes on Vulpes right now, I would have bet money that he had at least one weapon on him.  Not that he needed any.  

Cass huffed and left the room intact, surprisingly enough.  Vulpes only gave her a few seconds before moving slightly closer to me and asking urgently, “How did you learn about the office bombing?”

Crap.  I shrugged, half-glancing at Alerio and knowing the truth would sound insane.  “Um...”  Vulpes eyed Alerio and gave the subtlest nod, signaling him to leave us alone for a moment.  Alerio obeyed immediately.  Even if I hadn’t already figured that Vulpes held power among the Legion, Alerio’s expression would have clued me in.  

Once we were alone, Vulpes refocused his intense stare on me, awaiting an answer.  He wasn’t going to like the one I had to give.  

“This is going to sound crazy...”

*       *       *

It had been a dream.  The idea was completely absurd, and yet he was not lying.  Jack truly believed that somehow his dream had accurately predicted the future.  That or it had simply unnerved him to the point that he had felt the need to mention it, however unlikely it was to be true.  ...Then again, Jack had a head injury and a history of PTSD, along with other sorts of trauma.  He may have truly learned of the plan by some other means and either the injury left him disoriented or his mind was suppressing the real discovery.  In either case, questioning him further was pointless.  He needed rest, and I needed a better method of ensuring his safety.  

*      *      *

I couldn’t tell if he accepted that or just didn’t expect a better answer, but he said nothing after I explained.  He stood.  “You should rest.”

That seemed to be his way of saying goodbye, so I all but yelped out, “Wait.”  

Vulpes paused, mid-step, looking back towards me while the rest of his body remained frozen in place; the effect was unnerving.  “Yes?”

“Why are you having me watched?”

The faintest smile crept onto his lips.  It was a grim smile, admittedly.  “You did not think that the bear was a coincidence?  You have nearly been kidnapped as well, and almost killed in the recent incident with the bus, you are hardly safe on your own.”  

“I wasn’t alone in the car crash...but I see your point.”  I sighed and managed a grin, “Didn’t you say I was `coveted by the gods’?”

“Yes, but that was never entirely a good thing.  I am having you guarded until I know you are safe.”

It was a statement of fact, not an offer.  I only processed the full implication of his previous remark now.  “Wait, someone’s trying to have me killed?  These were all attempts on my life?”

“Perhaps not all of them, the bus may have been an ironic accident, but the bear was released with intent.”

“Why?  How do you know this?  Why would someone want to kill me?”

He hesitated for a fraction of a second.  “I do not know.”  

Somehow, I thought that was a lie.  

*       *       *

Jack was fast asleep the next time I stopped by to see him.  Granted, it was six in the morning and I was also exhausted, but I still felt a little sad knowing that, to get to sleep at a decent hour and get my car back, I’d have to wait around twelve hours to talk to him again.  Given how exhausted I still was with minimal sleep, after working over twelve hours with the hospital completely swamped by everyone injured or killed in the office bombing, I’d arranged to have Daisy drive me back after Johnson drove us out to my car.  

Johnson and Daisy both met me outside, I’d actually kept them waiting, and I felt bad for that, but a patient had coded, again, and I wanted to at least try to talk to Jack and let him know that I was going home for the night.  If someone, ideally Veronica, could watch Rex for a few days, I actually hoped to stay at the hospital non-stop until Jack...well, at least until he was less in danger.  Maybe even until he was able to leave.  The hospital had showers and pretty much enough amenities for me to get by, and staying in that creepy house was hardly restful...even if I hadn’t found myself even less able to sleep than usual due to my worry about Jack.  

It had probably been an hour since I’d said I’d meet them and a glance at my phone showed a call from Johnson, who had probably talked Daisy out of calling me five times.  They both understood why I was likely late, given that I was a doctor in a hospital trying to manage the crisis that had happened this afternoon; that was probably why Johnson had only called once, but I know Daisy would have worried.  Something Jack had done had made her suspicious and I doubt either of them had failed to notice all the armed men watching him day and night.  There had been one in his room when I’d checked on him before I left, and as bad as I felt leaving him alone with the guy, I knew he was at least relatively safe.  I wanted to believe that somehow they were protecting him, but I didn’t.  They wanted something from him, they had to, I just didn’t know what.  And my friends and I had more than enough reason to be suspicious.  

I understood that Daisy’s suspicions along with her eternal coddling of me, led her to think that either Jack was bad news or he was involved with something, or someone, who was bad news.  And how very true this turned out to be.  

After dropping by Jack’s room for a moment, I found Johnson in the car, trying, as I had expected, to talk Daisy out or a rant.  There were too many option for me to guess what exactly she was talking about, but I found out as I opened the door to greet them when I heard the phrase “half his age!”  Of course she was talking about Jack.  This was not what I needed right now.  

Luckily, Johnson realized this.  He smiled at me, the usual Daisy’s-being-her-stubborn-self smile.  “Hey, Arcade.”  

I sighed and got into the car as Daisy greeted me and immediately added.  “Do you know anything about the men who’ve been watching Jack all day?”

“I have no idea.”  Well, it was technically true.  I only had a strong suspicion.  And letting her know that the Legion somehow was interested in Jack would only make her protests more reasonable.  

She had that slight hesitation before she replied and I knew she was going to make me doubt myself, as usual.  Her intentions were good, but...it was frustrating when she kept treating me like I was five years old in practically all aspects of my life.  She probably tried to believe I was still a virgin...not that I particularly wanted her thinking I was a slut.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

I didn’t get a chance to test my ability to mask my frustration with her before Johnson interrupted.  “Daisy, I think he’s been through enough in the past few days.”  

Daisy gave a weighted sigh and fell silent, that sense of an oncoming lecture still hovering around her like storm clouds, though she didn’t bring up the topic again that day.  They both started asking me how I was doing and such as Johnson drove us towards Muir woods, where my car had been abandoned, still splattered in blood, for around two days.  

Inevitably Daisy asked if I’d been eating well, it was one of those things she always asked.  I had to admit that I hadn’t actually eaten since breakfast.  I had planned to grab a bowl of cereal or something at Jack’s house before I went to bed, if I had time, and I told Daisy as much, but she had none of it.  “You need a decent meal!  You’ll waste away if you keep skipping meals like this!”  

I was hardly wasting away.  Actually, the more time I spent around Jack’s impeccable body, the more I started to feel a bit self conscious.  I should probably start being a bit more careful about what I ate, but not eating was definitely _not_ the way to do that.  

“Daisy, you do realize that we probably shouldn’t all go to a restaurant together, right?”

She nodded, apparently willing to actually be sort of cautious about our past affiliations for a change.  “I’m well aware of that.  I was just thinking you boys could park sort of near a fast food place and I could run in and pick something up.  We could eat in the car, at least you’d have more than a bowl of cereal, that way.”

She had a point and we ended up agreeing to that, parking a block away from an Applebees while she called in from the car, ordered food, and then walked down the street to pick it up, leaving me and Johnson alone for a few minutes.  

“I have to admit, she might have a point,” Johnson remarked, “but this guy can’t really get into any more trouble than he already has, can he?”

Well, I wanted to believe that, but I had to sigh and admit with an inadvertent pun, “You don’t know Jack.”

The food was pretty good and even in the car, it reminded me of my childhood.  I really couldn’t tell if that was a good or bad thing.  

It wasn’t until we got to the deserted parking lot that I realized that the entrance I’d sped through had really been the exit.  I sighed, realizing that the minivan I’d nearly hit driving Jack in here had been right to take up most of the one-lane exit, I summarized the same when Johnson asked why I’d sighed.  Panic had inadvertently made me a jerk.  

“Your car was covered in blood, Arcade,” my old friend reassured me, “I think they got the message that it was an emergency.”  

We found my sage green, used Volkswagen splattered with dried blood and coated in a layer of forest debris.  We’d have to clean it off before we could drive it.  Luckily, Johnson had come prepared.  He kept a squeegee in his trunk along with an array of cleaning fluids.  Those were by far the least essential items in his excessively full trunk; in the few seconds it took us to get what we needed, I saw blankets, nonperishable food, flares, matches, emergency radios, a first aid kit, an axe, a chainsaw, body armor, and an AK-47.  His mini-gun was probably in here somewhere as well, considering that I knew his car served the same purpose as my lock box.  We closed the trunk quickly, before any early-morning hikers could happen to catch a glimpse.  

I didn’t even suggest that I clean off my car myself, I knew Johnson would insist and Daisy would take it as a personal affront, so they cleaned it off with me and soon enough Johnson bid us goodnight and Daisy was driving me home.  

I was too exhausted by that point to notice the way she was driving until we were halfway back.  She wasn’t a _bad_ driver, I trusted her to fly helicopters — not that she’d done that recently— she could easily handle cars, but it was clear she was used to air travel.  She had a tendency to hesitate just a little before hitting the brake and to drive above the speed limit as long as she felt she could do so safely.  It also took a few steep hills and a few frantic reminders before she got used to the fact that ground vehicles did not stay stopped on slopes.  She hadn’t driven in twenty years, and she’d always been more used to flying, so I suppose I should have expected that.  Jack would have been having a heart attack and I felt like I understood his fear of cars by the time we parked and I scrambled onto the street.  

Daisy stepped out and gave me a look that almost managed to be apologetic.  “Sorry.  It just doesn’t handle like I’m used to.”

As we were alone, I felt alright being blunt. “You expect my car to fly?  Even this one barely drives.”  Realizing how harsh that sounded, I added, “Sorry.  Thanks again for picking it up with me and everything.”

She nodded.  “Any time.”  I yawned and she glanced at her watch.  “You should get to sleep!  It’s nearly ten in the morning, don’t you work at five?”

I groaned.  Yeah, I did.  Damn it, I’d be exhausted for another day.  

~       ~       ~

Sleep came easily, but it didn’t last.  I jolted awake at two in the afternoon, awakened by one of my usual nightmares with the added twist that that creepy journalist had joined the cast of faceless government agents.  As if I needed more things to have nightmares about.  Rex was awake as well, lying on his cushion, whimpering.  At first I thought he was worried about me until I saw the subtle shivers running through his fur.  Was he sick?  Not knowing a dog’s normal body temperature, I couldn’t see if he had a fever and I knew he had food and water, so it wasn’t that.  I watched uncertainly, still trying to calm down from my nightmare and completely uncertain what to do with the dog until the shudders and whining slowly abated and he went back to sleep.  That was weird.  I’d have to mention it to Jack when I got a chance, but otherwise I wasn’t sure what to do.  Until I saw it continue, it might be something as simple as the dog having been cold and I didn’t want to call a vet over nothing.  Mentioning it to Jack was the best option for now.  

This close to when I had to wake up anyway and already wide awake thanks to that adrenaline rush, I had breakfast and a cup of tea.  Probably because of what had happened yesterday, there was no newspaper today, so, finding myself relatively idle, I wandered upstairs.  Maybe that painting Jack had been working on would look less creepy in daylight.  

Somehow it did.  The eerily dead-looking animal looked less frightening in the better lighting.  Somehow it seemed less...ghostly and more like some kind of memorial.  Looking at the equally morbid lion painting, I realized that was what they were.  They were memorials.  In Jack’s own way, he was immortalizing people he’d known.  The lion was almost obvious, now that I looked closely.  The wounds in the animal were from a car accident; I’d seen their like a thousand times.  And the animal’s eyes showed a faint reflection of a smashed dashboard and wrecked car, partly submerged in ocean water.  It was Jack’s father, I presumed.  

The other animal was more enigmatic, and one of the reasons was that it was still very much unfinished.  It didn’t seem to have any obvious wounds, but I couldn’t even recognize the species, so that wasn’t certain either.  The only thing I could really notice, looking at the work in progress, was that the buildings and bridge in the background looked European.  I couldn’t place why and I didn’t think this was a painting of Scotland, but something in the background led me to think it was somewhere in Britain.  Oh.  That’s what it was.  The top of a red telephone booth was clearly visible in one corner of the painting, almost completely finished as most of the buildings were.  

So Jack had lost someone in London?  Was this a suicide, as it looked to be, or was it something else?  I wanted to ask him out of curiosity, but I knew that was a bad idea.  He didn’t need any more pain right now; I wouldn’t ask, but if he wanted to talk...I hoped he knew that I’d listen.  

I found myself staring out the window at the view of the city to avoid studying the paintings which had suddenly gone from creepy to depressing.  How had I gotten so deeply involved with Jack so very quickly?  I’d known the guy for no more than a month and the certainty that getting hit by my car had nearly ended his life had horrified me a lot more than I’d expected it to— not that I hadn’t expected to care if I killed him, just...I was a doctor, and with my past I was pretty used to life-and-death situations.  It took a lot to leave me hysterical.  And just knowing that Jack was in the hospital— no doubt watched over by some creepy guy who was probably a member of the Legion— made me wish he was here.  

There were so many reasons that we really should not be in a relationship, not the least of them being the fact that Jack was practically half my age, and yet the guy had me completely wrapped around his finger.  Admittedly, I was hardly cold-hearted, and I guess I might even be called a hopeless romantic, despite how much I tried to hide that, but I’d never fallen “head-over-heels” as it were.  My previous relationships hadn’t exactly been cold, but compared to this one I’d call them “lukewarm” at best.  However dangerous Jack’s life was— whether or not that was his fault— and however much it annoyed me that he really didn’t seem to appreciate the things I actually envied about his life, I cared about Jack a hell of a lot more than I wanted to admit.  

*       *       *

I can’t remember ever having slept so much as I did that week, even when I was so suicidally depressed that I’d slept over twenty hours a day.  I’m not sure if it was the morphine, or the head injury, or just sheer boredom, but I was constantly tired for the first week in the hospital.  Luckily, that abated around the start of the second week.  I would much rather be awake.  As much as I loved to sleep, I felt bad sleeping while people wanted to see me and it wasn’t just that.  

Almost as soon as I stopped throwing clots and nearly dying, I had a recurring nightmare.  This wasn’t a memory, like most of my nightmares, but rather the sort of eerily vivid dream I was starting to believe predicted the future.  And, if that was the case, this wasn’t a good future.  I tried not to think about it while I was awake, but when I was alone in that hospital room, the awful images kept coming back.  

It was from this same haunting nightmare that my ringtone jolted me awake late one night.  It must have been around four in the morning and I guess that Eisbrecher didn’t make the most calming music.  Starting abruptly, as it always did on my phone, I was wide awake before I registered what I was hearing.  Apparently, I wasn’t the only one startled by it: glancing in the highly reflective windows as I reached to answer the call, I caught sight of Alerio, visibly tense, one hand in his pocket and the other beneath one side of his jacket.  Reaching for a weapon and his phone, I presumed.  I saw him relax and try to pretend that the sound hadn’t phased him.  

I glanced at my phone as I reached to answer it and realized the call had no name or number listed.  Initially, I’d figured that something had happened.  The only contacts on my phone were my voicemail, Arcade, and my sister (who had probably cut ties with me like the rest of my family,) so I’d expect this to be Arcade, calling because the house had burnt down or Rex had run away or something similarly suited to my terrible luck, but it wasn’t.  Even assuming it was a wrong number or telemarketer, I expected to see an unfamiliar phone number displayed.  That wasn’t the case.  My phone just said “call” and had the little phone-ringing icon with a blank space where a name or number should have been.  

I almost hung up, but curiosity got the better of me and I answered.  

“Hello?”

Even over the phone, the answering voice was unmistakable.  “I have a job in mind for you.”

I sat up as straight as I could, given the fact that moving my head still made me dizzy.  “A job?  I mean, I’m still in the hospital, but sure, what is it?”  

Vulpes Inculta laughed.  Again, it was that quiet, calculated laugh and not a natural laugh, so I had no idea if his genuine laugh still sounded ridiculous, though I was tempted to try and find out.  And he would no doubt kill me if I ever did find out, though it still seemed almost worth it.  “Jack, I am well aware that you are still in the hospital.”  I nearly face-palmed, only the certainty that hitting my skull in any way would agonize me restrained my hand.  This was Vulpes, of course he knew I was still here, he was having me guarded.  

He waited a moment before continuing and I got the sense that someone had interrupted him and been convinced to leave by that lethal stare.  “The leader of my organization is quite fond of art.  He has expressed an interest in your art, in particular.  I can provide images of him if you will paint a portrait.”

“Do you mean now, while I’m in the hospital, or once I’m released?”

“You seem rather bored in the hospital.”

“I don’t watch TV.  But I would need—”

“I can bring you your supplies, along with any unfinished paintings you would like to work on.”

Now _that_ sounded wonderful.  At least as wonderful as possible with sex being off the table.  Heck, between the heart monitors and the by-necessity open room, I couldn’t even masturbate right now, so writing porn was out of the question.  

I guess I paused just a little too long because Vulpes answered before I could with just a hint of a laugh to his voice, “I take it you look forward to my arrival with your supplies, then?”

When exactly did his terrifying nature get overtaken by absolute charm?  “Yeah.  Of course.”  I felt almost giddy at the thought.  This was like the dance at the party, he was being absurdly nice, except now there wasn’t any reason to keep up a facade.  And he wasn’t asking for money.  I was an idiot to have ever thought that his motives were anything but sexual, and maybe partly based on the fact that we’d known each other as kids.  And, maybe, just maybe, driven by a deeper feeling.  But that was really getting optimistic, too optimistic for me.  

I got the sense that he was about to hang up and added quickly, “Hey.  Be careful when you get them, you might want to go during the night when Arcade won’t be there.”

“Relax.  I have already taken care of your boyfriend.”

For a split second, I felt like my heart had dropped out of my chest.  Following that moment of horror, I had just enough time to belatedly muse over the fact that he’d referred to Arcade as my boyfriend, which he admittedly was, they both were, before Vulpes reassured, “I did not kill him, if that’s what you thought.  I have merely proved to him that my combat skills are superior to his.”  I really wasn’t sure how to take that statement.  It made me think “rape” but “concussion” seemed more likely.  Besides, Vulpes had a good ten years on Arcade and considering he didn’t sound shot over the phone, he’d probably taken on the doctor unarmed.  Not that I necessarily thought Arcade could disarm Vulpes.  

Before I could say anything more, Vulpes concluded.  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”  He hung up.  

Wait a second.  How the hell had he gotten my phone number?

*       *       *

With the disaster at the newspaper building I ended up missing a lot of my breaks, and therefore missing a lot of the time I could spend with Jack.  Rex had had another two strange bouts of whining and shaking, so I couldn’t just stay at the hospital overnight to spend time with Jack, I needed to keep an eye on his dog until I knew what to do about it.  I couldn’t risk leaving Veronica with Rex without knowing what was wrong and I hadn’t managed to catch Jack when he was awake to ask him.  I was tempted to call Calamity, see if she or Doc Henry could help, but on the other hand, having already called them so recently...I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I knew him in case anyone was monitoring our calls.  But a little over a week after Jack was admitted, while I was getting ready for work and the dog was following me around, as usual, Rex completely collapsed.  He didn’t pass out, at least, more like fell over.  I wasn’t a vet, but going off what I knew of human anatomy, it could be a balance problem, muscle weakness, or something neurological, or at least those seemed most likely.  But I didn’t know veterinary medicine.  I really hoped Jack was awake today.  

I didn’t actually get over to Jack’s room until after dawn, the whole day was a constant series of patients nearly dying for one reason or another.  I grabbed a chicken salad once my shift finally ended and headed up to Jack’s room with my first actual meal of the day.  He was asleep when I got there, unsurprisingly.  With the amount of morphine he was being dosed with and the kind of injury he’d sustained, that wasn’t too surprising.  The man guarding him this time gave me one very bored nod and went on staring at the doorway.  I got the sense that this was hardly his favorite assignment and almost felt bad for the guy.  

Well, even if he was asleep, I was already up here, I might as well eat with him.  

*       *       *

For the first time, rather than being awakened by a dream or my phone, I was roused from my sleep by the scent of salad dressing, of all things.  Grateful I hadn’t been startled awake, I just opened my eyes and looked around.  Arcade was eating.  I had no idea what to say.  He also didn’t seem to realize that I’d actually awakened, although I didn’t move very much.  I had no reason to move, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.  

After a few moments watching him and vainly trying to think of something to say, I asked the first thing that came to mind.  

“Why do you carry a gun?”

He coughed, nearly chocking on his salad.  “Jack?  Are you feeling alright?”

I nodded.  “I’m fine, just very bored.  How are you?”  I started to add that he looked exhausted, but that seemed insulting even if it was accurate and I didn’t mean it that way.  To be honest I _really_ liked the fact that he was older than me, whatever that implied about me psychologically.  

“Well, things have been busy.  _Really_ busy.”  He trailed off, relaxing now that I was awake, but some worry came back to his voice as he explained what had been happening with Rex and asked what I thought.  

*       *       *

Jack tilted his head vaguely, considering.  “That’s...not good.  Um, shaking could be chills or something neurological, whining probably just means pain, the falling down...  Well, going by the most common conditions, it’s probably an ear infection.  Get a thermometer for him and take his temperature.  It should be around a hundred-and-two degrees, above one-oh-four is a definite fever.”

That wasn’t all.  he hesitated, frowning and for a second I thought he was going to ask again about why I had a gun.  

*       *       *

“The thing is, if it isn’t a fever, it’s bad.  Muscle weakness could be at least a dozen different conditions, or even just old age, but if the shaking isn’t a fever, the most likely condition...”  I paused.  Even though I’d just got the dog, even though he was still just a dog...I didn’t want to lose anyone else.  Even a furry, second-hand canine somebody else.  “If it’s neurological, it most likely means a brain lesion, probably a tumor.”

He didn’t say anything, but he gave me that sympathetic look again, he knew I was worried about my dog.  Or rather about how I would handle it if my dog died.  I really hoped Rex had a fever.  

I had to change the subject.  “You never answered my question.”

He froze for a full second.  I almost thought he was going to answer.  He leaned forward a little and gave a subtle nod towards the bodyguard I’d completely forgotten about.  It wasn’t Alerio right now; I didn’t know the man’s name.  I thought that would be the end of it, but to my great surprise, the legionary stalked out into the hallway and shut the door, apparently waiting in the hall.  

Apparently, Arcade was just as surprised as I was that the guy had taken the hint.  It took him a moment during which I stared at him expectantly until he admitted in a barely audible whisper, “I...my family has a bit of a dangerous history.  Just...don’t ask, please.”

Well...I guess I had my own secrets.  I could understand.  The curiosity would drive me crazy, but I’d understand.  The doctor was turning out to be a bit less open and pure than I had thought...which was probably for the best; I was certainly no angel myself, and now I was no longer so afraid of repeating my mistakes as to think that I needed someone purely good.  I was an idiot to think that I’d be compatible with someone like that, or rather that they’d be alright with my own highly questionable morality.  Arcade had some secrets, and just knowing how to use a gun as well as he did suggested that he hopefully had enough darkness to him that our relationship might somehow be able to last if he ever found out everything about me.  He’d probably be pissed off, and we’d probably have quite a fight, but there was a chance.  A tiny chance.  

*       *       *

Skull fractures this severe didn’t heal fast.  Jack would be in the hospital for nearly a month, until the end of November.  The bandages on his head got taken off as soon as the bone was stable, which took a few weeks, and it was disorienting to see his hair growing back in what was basically a crew cut.  And I knew he was disturbed by that too, he kept reaching to brush it back reflexively.  I guess going from ass-length hair to a crew cut was a bit distracting, it was distracting for me too, he didn’t look right with short hair.  

The next day after he’d asked why I carried a gun, I’d come in to find Jack painting.  He finished the painting of the leaping animal and told me nothing about who it represented.  I didn’t ask directly, of course, I knew it was a bad memory, but when I invited him to talk about the painting, he gave me technical details, descriptions of the strokes, the artistic techniques, and stories about how he knew what London looked like in the rain.  He was vague about the latter and at the time I never made the connection.  

He had another canvas in the room, only one other, but he kept it behind the bodyguard, facing the wall and never worked on it when I was there.  I never knew what he was painting on that one, but it vanished a few weeks later, apparently completed.  I figured he’d sold it to someone.  

The creepy journalist dropped by a few times, I saw him in the hospital twice but always from a distance and some of Jack’s many other visitors mentioned him hanging around my bed-ridden paramour.  Practically everyone he’d met turned out to see him at least once, and he knew a lot of people, from the sound of it, considered how briefly he’d been here and how he hadn’t been the most social guy.  

That was, for the most part, everything good that happened that month, although I guess my job got slightly less busy with the lack of any other major disasters.  The bad news was pretty much focused in one area.  Rex didn’t have a fever.  


	23. The Remedy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rex is sorted and Jack gets an unexpected, awkward phone call and an unexpectedly awkward invitation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter name taken from multiple songs by that name. A pretty short chapter that was rather fun to write. The next one and maybe a few after that will probably be longer chapters, but I may break them up, I'm not sure yet.

I checked Rex for a fever the morning after Jack suggested it and found nothing.  If anything, his body temperature was low, around a hundred degrees instead of a hundred-and-two.  But without a fever, this was probably brain cancer.  Luckily a close friend of mine was among the best canine neurosurgeons in the country, if not the world.  When he wasn’t obsessed with studying something else.  

Still, I might not be able to risk contacting Henry again.  I wanted to, I _really_ wanted to for Jack’s sake, but I figured I’d mention it to Daisy first.  She was the most likely to agree with me anyway, given her cavalier attitude about staying in hiding.  But we already planned to get together at the end of the month, a risk that was hopefully going to turn out alright.  

Jack was actually fairly happy when I reached his room.  He’d finished the memorial painting sometime within the past few hours; it was leaning against the window and I could faintly smell the paint drying.  It showed a stunningly realistic thylacine plunging, almost defiantly, off a bridge towards the viewer.  I couldn’t tell if this implied suicide or some kind of death-in-the-line-of-duty so I suspected the later.  

When I arrived, Jack was lying in bed, his legs pulled up a little because he could finally move.  He could actually walk now without risking even more serious injury, although his balance was a bit shaky.  He was sketching something on a drawing pad that had appeared in his room as inexplicably as his paints and other art tools; at the time I’d just figured that Veronica or one of the other neighbors had brought them over.  He smiled so peacefully as he worked.  

*       *       *

I caught that worried look on Arcade’s face before he forced a smile and I feared the worst.  He tried to delay what he had to tell me, probably about Rex.  

“Hi.  ...you seem to be feeling better...”  

I sighed, bracing myself.  “I know you have bad news.  What is it?”

He looked around, his eyes settling on the painting I’d finished to avoid my gaze.  “Jack...Rex doesn’t have a fever.”

*       *       *

I was surprised that he’d read me so well and then worried when he barely seemed to react to what I said.  He stared down at the pen in his hand, nodded very slowly, and said nothing.  

“Jack?”  

“I’m fine.  Sorry.  Just...I’ve just lost a lot of people lately.”  His voice caught in his throat and I could see his eyes starting to glisten, but he wasn’t actually crying yet, though he still looked away and tried to hide it.  The legionary watching Jack, whom we’d both forgotten about, had the unexpected decency to step out of the room, as I realized later.  

Jack managed to regain his composure for a few seconds.  “I know it’s kind of stupid, I just...I don’t want to lose my dog as well...even if I’ve only had him for a few weeks.”  He held off for another instant and then broke down, although at least it wasn’t quite as bad as I’d seen him before.  He was slowly getting over whatever had happened to him.  But it wasn’t as if Rex had died, I’d only told him the dog was probably very sick.  I didn’t want to see how he’d react if Rex died.  Even as it was, I hugged him and he nearly fell out of bed with how forcefully he snuggled against me.  He’d been through enough already, even just since I’d met him, and it sounded like he’d gone through hell before that.  He wasn’t going to lose Rex as well.  I would do everything within my power to make sure he didn’t lose anyone else.  

*       *       *

Finding out that Rex likely had a brain tumor, that my dog would almost certainly die, hit me a lot harder than I’d wanted it to.  I mean, I hadn’t expected to be happy about it, but he was still just a dog.  But I’d lost too much in the past few months alone, even if not everything was as important as a human life.  Although, I guess in a way some of the people who’d cut ties with me might was well be dead, for all the difference it made.  I’d probably never see or hear from them again, the only difference was that in most if not all cases I couldn’t even visit their grave.  I was better than I’d been when I’d first arrived and contemplated jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge to avoid the risk of getting close to someone else and then losing them, but I don’t think I was ready to lose anyone else just yet, even a dog.  That feeling that I wasn’t ready to risk losing anyone yet was part of the reason I didn’t dare end things with either Arcade or Vulpes, or even mention Vulpes to Arcade.  I’d only had Rex for a little over a week, not counting the time I’d been in the hospital unable to see the poor dog.  He’d probably been alone most of the day, I realized suddenly.  I should ask Veronica or someone to dog-sit, partly to keep the poor animal company and partly to make sure he didn’t have a seizure or something while no one was watching him.  

Ultimately, I never got the chance to ask her.  

Arcade had only stopped by to tell me about Rex, but he’d also brought over my laptop, so, depressed by the news, I took out my computer once Arcade left.  I actually wanted to paint, but had no ideas in that direction, so I checked an online newspaper while debating what to write to work through my emotions.  Checking the date jogged my memory that it was mid November.  I’d missed Guy Fawkes Day.  I’d never been a huge fan of most holidays, but I liked that one because I liked fire, it was more the knowledge that, looking ahead to Christmas, I’d almost certainly never see another of my family’s spectacular Christmases.  For a split second, I envisioned myself having Christmas alone and felt even worse until I realized that I’d actually probably spend Christmas much as I had spent Halloween.  Spending the holidays with Arcade, or Vulpes, or better yet both of them (alternating, of course) and possibly seeing the rest of the people I knew around town sounded great.  Although ending up alone wasn’t, unfortunately, out of the question, with my luck and the precarious situation I’d gotten myself into with my boyfriends.  One way or another, I felt like this was going to end badly for all of us.  And it was still pretty likely that Rex, at least, wouldn’t be with me in December.  

*       *       *

I called Doc Henry that night, explaining what was going on.  He got that tone like I was interrupting his work, which I probably was, but he could hear how upset I sounded and explained that he’d do the surgery if I could get the dog out there to him.  He offered a bit less grudgingly than I’d expected, which hopefully meant that his work wasn’t really making progress right now.  On one hand, that meant he’d be frustrated, but on the other it made it easier to talk him into taking a break if he didn’t feel like he was actually getting anywhere.  I’d drive Rex up tomorrow after work, I had the day after that off anyway, and the dog worried me more the longer he went without surgery, even if the worst I’d seen from him was another collapse.  

The next day was not a good day.  I woke from the usual nightmares to find the dog sprawled on the bathroom floor, seizing.  Seizing was worrying enough, but thinking back later in the day, I realized that he had no reason to be in there unless he’d heard something from the sealed-off hallway behind the painting.  He survived the seizure, even though I had no real idea what to do for dogs in that situation, and that left me worrying about him all day.  I skipped breakfast to call everyone I knew who could feasibly watch Rex until I got off work and ended up having Lily watch him as everyone else was busy.  Hopefully she’d taken her meds today.  

That awful morning left me in a terrible mood for most of my shift and almost as worried about the poor old dog as I would have been if I’d left him alone.  I wanted to mention it all to Jack, but decided that telling him while I was so obviously stressed by the dog’s predicament might not be the best idea.  I’d tell Jack once Rex was safely in Doc Henry’s care.  

I was in such a state that Emily, who usually ignored me so completely that she didn’t even know my name and somehow managed to mistake me for a male nurse nine times out of ten, actually commented on my emotional state.  

“Kincade?  You seem upset today.  Is something bothering you?”

I very nearly snapped at her.  Kincade?  Of all the ways to misremember my name?  And as if it wasn’t obvious that I was stressed about something?  “Well, my boyfriend’s been in the hospital for the past two weeks and my dog probably has brain cancer.”  I hadn’t meant to call Rex my dog, but realized it was true all the same.  I hadn’t really expected to move this quickly in my attachment to Jack, heck, at this rate by next year, we’d be...well, it was better not to think that far ahead anyway, at least not this early on.  Besides, with Jack’s luck we’d more likely be dead by then.  

Either the bluntness of that statement shocked her speechless or she really didn’t care and didn’t even listen to my response.  Emily nodded vaguely and left the little paper-work alcove without a reply.  

Going back to the patient’s records I’d been reading, I added under my breath, “Oh, Emily, how considerate of you to ask, you clearly know me so well and care so very deeply.”  I was tempted to stop there, but I was alone and in a mood, and the quiet had been getting to me all day.  Besides, it wasn’t as if I really had anyone to talk to right now.  Daisy’s attitude about Jack took her mostly off the table, although hopefully she’d warm to him soon or else the idea I’d been toying with would be a lot less pleasant than I was hoping.  

“Oh, Emily, you’re such a perfect confidant, you’re always _so_ helpful.  This is exactly why I always tell you about these things, like the time my apartment burned down, and when my car got totaled, and hitting my boyfriend with the next car that I bought, and finding out that he’d been raped—”

A gasp halted my rant and I looked up to see Julie at one end of the almost-office, holding a clipboard and giving me those pitying doe-eyes.  “He finally told you?”

The fact that she knew baffled me for a split second until I pieced it together.  

“Wait a second, _that_ was what he’d been to the hospital about earlier?  When neither of you told me what had happened?  It was _that bad_?”

Julie hesitated and then nodded.  I was definitely going to kill that damn journalist.  

*       *       *

Between the recurring nightmare I’d been having and just being in a hospital, it was difficult to keep a regular sleep schedule so I mostly just slept when I was bored and alone.  Or at least mostly alone.  I’d been watched around the clock, usually by Alerio, but sometimes by another Legion man who never spoke.  I hadn’t seen Vulpes for a while, he hadn’t even picked up the painting he’s requested himself.  I guess he was busy.  

Alerio was on watch the night that my phone rang at two in the morning.  I’d been drawing, just sketching animals on my sketch pad, one headphone in and playing Madonna.  My phone startled me into messing up and it made Alerio flinch, as before.  With how little I even used my phone, I didn’t expect anyone beyond Arcade, my sister, and apparently Vulpes to have my number.  Arcade was at work, if he wanted to talk to me, he could just walk up to my room, and I hadn’t heard from my sister since I’d left home, for all I knew she thought I was dead.  I expected to hear the unique voice of my lethal paramour through the speaker when I answered without checking the number, and as a result my own voice had the slightest hint of a playful grin.  “Hello?”

“Hello, Jack.”  I got that feeling like when you miss a step going down the stairs.  It wasn’t Vulpes.  It was my mother.  

Instantly, I had a hundred questions all vying for priority in my mind.  How had she gotten my new number?  Why did she think it was a good time to call?  Did she even know where I was now?  Why was she calling me at all?  

“How are you, Jack?”

Her voice sounded sad and I heard my own voice break as I answered, “I-I’m...fine.”

“I heard you moved to America.”

“Yeah.”  I had no idea what to say or even what I wanted to say.  She’d made my life miserable, somehow more miserable than it had been at the time.  She’d thrown my old laptop down the stairs at me and ordered me out of the house the last time I’d seen her.  What the hell had made her change her mind now?  

I guess Alerio realized it was an awkward conversation because, he crept out into the hall and closed the door.  I was healthy enough now anyway that the nurses didn’t need to check me often, so the door didn’t have to stay open.  

I sought for anything to add.  “I...heard you got promoted.”

Promoted by sudden death, I realized with a grimace.  She hadn’t been close to her boss, but she probably hadn’t hated him enough to enjoy his death.  She hesitated and didn’t comment on what I’d said.  “How are you doing?  Are you...living somewhere?  I hear you are still...writing?”

The sorrow and confusion that had mostly occupied my mind up to that point were suddenly pushed back by a trace of the hatred I’d briefly felt towards her after she’d disowned me.  What right did she have to ask it like that?  Like what I did for a living was some horrible abomination— almost as much as who I happened to be attracted to, who I was?  “Yes.  I am still writing.”  I wasn’t quite defiant and I didn’t snap at her, but I bit out each word very clearly.  If she had called just to berate me or to try and guilt me into changing who I was and who I wanted to be, I was going to...I don’t know what I was going to do.  

“You’re new book’s doing well, apparently.  I hear it’s a romance?”

What was this, a conversation or an interview?  “Yeah.”

She paused.  “Is there any... _reason_ for that?”

Why the hell did she care?  Wasn’t this the part of my life she most hated?  Between my writing and my dating, these were the last things I expected her to ask about.  The sadness came back and I almost felt sick as it welled in the back of my throat.  My eyes started to tear up until I couldn’t clearly see the lines of my sketches any more.  I missed her, and I loved her, and I hated her, and I loved that I hated her and I hated that I loved her, and I hated that she had, at least until now, hated me.  Why was she doing this to me?  She’d kicked me out, put me through all of that, left me completely cut off from everyone and everything I’d known, and now she just called me up like I was going to forget all that?  I was concussed, I was in the hospital, and my dog was fucking dying, I didn’t need any more to deal with right now!  “What the hell do you want from me?!”

Silence.  Yeah, of course she was silent, I could almost picture that god damned scowl she’d have because I’d said the word “hell.”  

She started to answer and her tone set me off all the more, I was crying now, as well as practically snarling into the phone, but I didn’t yell.  Even this emotional, I was still fucking terrified that someone would hear me and notice the catching sobs in my voice.  “Look, I don’t need this, whatever this is!  I was fucking homeless because of you!  I got out of that _myself_ , I got to America _myself_ , and I got beat up the first day I was even here, mugged and sent to the ER.  I live in the best part of town and we found a _corpse_ in my _basement._   I got in a _car accident_ the second day I was here.  My new boyfriend’s house burned down and I was almost _enslaved_.  I got hit by a car and attacked by a grizzly bear _in the same day_ , I have a skull fracture, and the dog I just got is probably dying of cancer.  I’ve been on morphine practically the entire time I’ve been here and my right arm only just healed from being broken the day I arrived.  I’ve had more shit happen to me here than on any of our trips together, and I’m _still_ happier...”  

I held my breath, forcing the sobs to stop coming and praying she’d just hang up.  I’d been about to say that I was still happier without her, but I don’t think I really meant it.  I didn’t want to have this conversation.  I didn’t know what I wanted.  I’d already resigned myself to never hearing from her again months ago and now she was suddenly back in my life.  I had no idea what to do, I just wanted to cry, but I refused to let her hear that.  Maybe if she hung up now I could just get it over with and I could just go back to trying to forget about her.  

“Jack...”

Shut up, please, just shut up.  

“...I’m sorry, Jack.”

I’d set down my sketch book and sat with my arm around my legs and my face buried in my knees, I only held the phone out of curiosity any more, but I looked up when she said that.  

“...Sorry for what?”

“I’m sorry for everything.”

I...I wasn’t sure I could even comprehend that.  Emotionally, I just couldn’t process it right now.  What had brought this on?  Now I was worried.  Was she dying or something?

“Why?”

I guess some of my worry must have been audible in my voice because she gave that quiet laugh she kept reserved for when we’d narrowly escaped some dangerous situation, “Just had a close call.  I’m fine.  Are you happy?”

I wasn’t sure what to say.  I guess she figured that out.  

“Is he good to you?”

“What?  Who?”

“Your boyfriend.”

“Yeah.”  I don’t know why the response was so immediate.  I hadn’t realized until after I had said it that for some reason I was referring to Arcade.  Vulpes didn’t cross my mind until after I’d answered, thought I wanted to believe that I would have said the same for both of them.  I missed him.  Maybe I’d just thought of Arcade because I couldn’t handle the pain of missing Vulpes, even though he’d only been gone a little while.  

“What’s he like?”

Why was she so interested?  Even if she was sorry, wasn’t this something about me that disgusted her?  I was almost angry again, but really I was just too sad and uncertain to really get mad at her again.  “He’s...a doctor.  He’s tall, smart, very kind, and a bit older than me.”  I’m still not sure if I added that last descriptor because I liked it, because I wasn’t thinking, or just to try and piss her off.  If she was angry, I could get angry as well and it wouldn’t hurt so much.  I could handle rage, rage was good, it wasn’t more infernal sadness.  “He’s saved my life.”  At least once, maybe twice or more.  Although he also hit me with his car, but that was my fault.  Somehow I wasn’t sobbing anymore.  

“Do you love him?”

The question completely blind-sided me and that was added to by the fact that Arcade walked in as my mom asked it.  He looked confused, probably from seeing Alerio waiting outside, but seeing me on the phone he understood.  He gestured in a way that conveyed the silent question, “should I leave?”  

I shook my head as much as I could, given how sore it still was.  I considered my answer.  

“Yeah.”

Something happened on the other end of the line as Arcade walked over and sat down beside me, on the bed.  I heard voices and my mother answering in what sounded like Korean.  I had the lights off because I liked looking out the open windows at night and I guess that had concealed the fact that I’d been crying, but now Arcade noticed.  He didn’t say anything, waiting for the call to end, but he got that look in his eye.  Right now, I really appreciated that look.  

My mother got back on the line.  “Sorry, I have to go.  I’ll call again soon, Jack.”  She hesitated for the barest second.  “I love you.”  The call ended and I set my phone on the table as if my hand had gone numb.  

“Jack?  Are you alright?”

I stared at the phone for a long moment, trying to process everything that conversation had encompassed before looking up at Arcade.  It took a lot longer than it should have to realize that he was holding one of my hands.  

“Are you alright?” he repeated, quirking an eyebrow when I didn’t answer.  The expression was half amusement and half intensified concern.  It was cute enough that I relaxed just a little.  I shrugged.  

“I’m...as alright as I’m going to be, I guess.”  He looked like he had something to tell me.  “What is it?”  The emotion started to flood back into my voice as I wondered if this was about Rex.  

“Rex had a seizure this morning— he’s okay, or at least he’s stable.  I’m... I know a guy.  A...a canine neuroscientist.  He has the equipment and expertise to help Rex, I’m taking Rex to see him once my shift ends.  He’ll probably have to stay there a while.”

I think he expected a reaction, he looked almost braced, like I was made of glass or something and one wrong word could shatter me.  Well, I guess, admittedly, that was a pretty accurate description of my emotional state.  But this was good news as well as bad news.  Rex had seized, so something was definitely wrong with his brain, but he would also be going to an expert for treatment, and in only a few hours.  The good and bad seemed to balance out to neutral.  

When I didn’t react, Arcade smoothed out one of the small bandages over the healing cuts on my arm (it had gotten pulled back a bit earlier when I wrapped that arm around my legs) and stared up at me thoughtfully.  

“Look, I...I was wondering...  Well, you...you don’t really seem to be on good terms with your family, and it’s...well...”  He cleared his throat, jumping straight to the point.  “I don’t normally ask this, and I know we’ve only actually known each other for about a month— albeit a very eventful month— but considering we’re living together and assuming you don’t have other plans, and it is nearly Thanksgiving, I was wondering if you’d want to join me for...that.”

I tilted my head.  He’d lost me.  “For...?”

*       *       *

“For Thanksgiving.  Sorry.”  Between finding him crying in the middle of some phone conversation, seeing him hardly react to the news about Rex, and how stressed I’d been all day, I guess I’d just lost my ability to make clear points.  

“The American food holiday?”  He shrugged.  “Sure?”  He seemed a little confused.  I guess he was wondering why I was acting like this was such a big deal whereas I’d asked him out to the Halloween party so casually.  

“The American food holiday pretty much centered around sharing a meal with _family_ ,” I clarified, “and we’d probably be staying overnight, it’s...difficult to get there and back otherwise.”  

He tilted his head.  “Where?”

“A— um...east of here.”

*       *       *

I quirked an eyebrow, actually smiling now.  Alright, be an enigma, as usual.  It was starting to get kind of cute.  Maybe even sexy.  

“With your family?  Does that include Daisy?”

“Well, yeah.  And other...friends of mine.”

“Garrett?”

“No.”  The answer was so immediate that he practically cut me off and before I could laugh, he’d already backpedaled, “Not that I dislike him, it’s just...this is kind of...  Daisy and some other old friends are...they’re the people I grew up with.  They were close to my parents, they’re pretty much my family.”

“...and Thanksgiving is only family?”

“Yeah.”  Now I got why he was so awkward about this.  

“And me?”

He hesitated, being awkward for a fraction of a second, although I got the sense that he was less awkward about what he was suggesting and more awkward about how I might react to it.  “Yeah.”


	24. Surrender

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vulpes has a question he needs answered...and the most inopportune time to ask it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter name taken from the song of the same name by the band Cheap Trick.   
> This is a fairly short chapter leading up to what will probably be a long one. I've been in a writing mood lately.

I didn’t check the news the day after my mother had called.  Apparently, Arcade had gotten Lily to watch Rex and Veronica had seen the activity and thought that I was home.  She’d come over to welcome me back and, finding Lily, she’d been told about Rex.  Which, of course meant that now the whole town knew about Rex.  Everyone (except, of course, Vulpes) had come in to talk to me, most offering comfort in whatever way they were used to.  As Cass and Garrett couldn’t offer booze, they were stumped until both of them separately decided to volunteer for a threesome, should I ever want one.  Cass, I, of course, turned down, Garret I’d consider.  Hopefully that was something I could talk Arcade into later on.  Whatever was going on with Rex I was still in an unprecedentedly good mood, and awkwardly dealing with the constant visits from people I didn’t necessarily know all that well could not dampen my happiness.  

After that, time flew by to Thanksgiving.  With Rex being treated wherever Arcade had taken him (he still hadn’t told me), Arcade had been spending dramatically more time with me.  He stopped by before and after his shifts and even stayed with me overnight a few times, sleeping in the chair.  It was, at least, a fairly comfortable chair rather than one of the metal and plastic ones that had been in the lobbies.  Even sleeping in the chair, I could tell he was much more relaxed than he had been before.  I was glad to have him there.  Knowing Arcade was there actually helped me sleep, even if he sometimes asked about my nightmare when it woke me up.  I guess he thought it was about one of my traumatic memories, because he let it go when I didn’t explain.  

As time went on and I kept having the dream, I gradually saw more of it.  Most of my dreams like this only began shortly before the event they foretold, even when I had the dreams multiple times.  It had never been more than a week between the start of a dream and the event it preceded, maybe the head injury had changed something.  This dream, strangely enough, persisted, becoming more detailed and more clear each time I had it.  And that made it worry me all the more.  

*       *       *

Thanksgiving came fast, or at least the day Jack was released and we headed up to Doc Henry’s place for Thanksgiving came fast.  With Jack having been in the hospital for so long and with me having just gotten off work, we had to actually go back to his house for him to pack and for me to avoid leaving luggage in my car all day, not that it would have been too out of the ordinary.  We decided we’d leave my car there.  My friends and I had already opted to take Johnson’s SUV up to Doc Henry’s; none of us wanted to test my new car with snow chains.  Given how mediocre most of my car purchases turned out to be, I agreed wholeheartedly, although with Jack’s history with cars, I wasn’t sure the choice would matter.  

My little Volkswagen hadn’t even fared well hitting Jack; although we’d scrubbed most of the blood off the hood and had a car wash service (a very disturbed car-washing service) do the rest, the front end was still slightly dented and the passenger side seat had bloodstains that couldn’t be removed without taking the fabric with them.  Seeing the car, Jack winced.  “Sorry.  I really have an awful history with cars.  I can pay to fix it, if you want?”

“I nearly kill you with my car, and you’re apologizing for denting the fender?  I think we need to work on your self-worth issues.”  He chuckled, but got that hollow look in his eyes again.  Just when I was thinking he was finally starting to get over his traumas.  

“Are you alright?”

Jack forced a grin.  “You’ve saved my life multiple times.  I’m fine.”  

Somehow Jack’s odd sleeping habits meant that he felt almost as exhausted as I did when my shift ended, so he said little on the drive back to his apartment.  He had a bagel while he rode, the last semblance of a hospital meal because he’d checked out too early to have a full breakfast.  I guess it woke him up a little because he perked up while we climbed the stairs, now completely recovered from his momentary depression.  He’d seemed excited for Thanksgiving for several weeks now, and even though he was tired, I guess that excitement started to bubble to the surface.  Or else he was just happy to be out and able to move around freely again.  He looked so different with short hair; it hadn’t grown out more than a few inches after being shaved off for the surgery to mend the skull fracture and somehow the long hair had added to the contagious quality of his joy in a way that his short hair did not.  His smile still made up for that, at least as far as I was concerned.  

“So when are your friends gonna pick us up?” Jack asked, pausing to look around the deserted stairs.  I presumed he was curious as to why he was not being followed; the Legion men had inexplicably vanished a few days ago with no explanation what-so-ever.  Granted, I had also been with Jack almost constantly since a bit before that time, so it might just be that they didn’t think they could actually do whatever they wanted to do to him with me around, but somehow I doubted that was the case.  

“They should be here around noon, but we probably want to pack as soon as possible just to be sure we’re ready to go.”  This was Daisy, or at least Daisy with Johnson.  The last thing she needed was another reason to claim that Jack was not right for me, and if he was slow to get ready, she’d never let me hear the end of it.  Being able to pack quickly had always been a high priority in my “family.”  

Jack shrugged.  “I already have my laptop and sketchpad,” he remarked, patting the thin satchel slung over his shoulder, the only thing he was carrying aside from his case of paints.  I had the finished painting under one arm.  “I only need to throw clothes in a bag and I’m ready.  And I suspect you’ve already packed, haven’t you?”  

I had to pause and frown at him.  “How exactly do you know me so well?”

*       *       *

I had two immediate responses and I bit back the first.  Truthfully, he reminded me of my mother.  They were both so organized that I felt doubly inclined to just trust them and coast along.  That constant control was part of why it bothered me that I hadn’t heard from my mother since that abrupt call the previous week.  She was busy, yes, but she had told me she would call soon, and yet she hadn’t.  It wasn’t like her.  

Shaking off my worry, I refocused on Arcade.  The other reason I’d expected him to be packed was that his secrecy made me think he was on the run or something.  I mean, this was the last guy I thought could ever be a criminal, so I suspected some sort of misunderstanding or one of those issues where law contradicted morality.  He seemed like the kind of person who not only organized things well in advance but also ensured that he could easily leave or defend himself at a moment’s notice.  The first clue of that, I supposed, had been the spartan furnishings he’d brought with him when he moved in or maybe just the gun he carried.  Hell, I’d had more stuff with me after getting here by plane and living homeless.  I guess it was a good thing that I’d always traveled like a pack mule.  

I just grinned and didn’t answer, unlocking my house and rushing to set my paints down.  

*       *       *

Jack was already upstairs when I stepped inside to take my shoes off.  He hadn’t seemed the type to hurry, but I guess he was excited and wanted to be sure he was ready.  Figuring he was packing, as I already had, I closed the door and ran over the mental list of what I needed to pack.  The emergency stuff was already taken care off, that was mostly Johnson’s job anyway as it was his vehicle.  His second vehicle, so I figured he would probably just move the things from his sedan’s trunk into the Hummer.  I think it was a hummer, anyway.  I’d never actually seen his larger car, I just knew it was something huge and off-road capable in the extreme.  

With emergency supplies off the list, I was pretty sure I’d packed everything even remotely necessary.  Jack and I weren’t expected to bring any food for the simple reason that I had always been the best cook of the group by far, and Jack was with me.  I was the default chef so I would cook and everyone else would bring food, my odd little family of friends had come up with this arrangement long ago.  I knew Jack could cook and had already planned on asking him to help me, it seemed like something he’d enjoy and it would give my friends a chance to actually talk openly with each other without letting Jack in on what exactly we had in common.  I should probably have remembered to suggest this to him before now.  Whoops.  

I headed upstairs to tell him, half considering the logistics of taking a nap between now and when Daisy and Johnson would arrive to pick us up.  

In under ten minutes, Jack had already packed and was completely ready to go.  It turned out that napping was not in his plans right now, he had something else in mind.  Something that left napping entirely out of the question.  

He was on me as soon as I opened the door.  Knowing him, I really should have expected this.  

*       *       *

I know that I startled him with the first kiss, but he caught on fast.  I don’t really know how far I had planned on going right then; I had already packed, and I did feel well enough for sex, but I was exhausted, and I hadn’t been sure if he’d even be interested right now, given that he was probably quite tired as well.  Arcade responded to my kiss and to me practically tackling him against the wall by kissing me back.  Hard.  Maybe he was trying to be more forceful because he’d realized that I liked that, or maybe he was just horny after presumably not having had sex since I wound up in the hospital.  I edged us back towards the bed automatically.  

Even though almost all the times we’d had sex had been limited to those few days between Halloween and the Day of the Dead, I guess he felt that he knew how I expected to do this by now.  That was probably why he paused when I lay down on my back.  I had my hands on his back and between that and the fact that we’d still been kissing, he’d leaned forward as I lay down, but he broke the kiss to frown at me curiously.  I hadn’t let him top since we’d started this.  I think, after I’d limited our first attempt to frottage, he probably thought I was somehow averse to letting him take me that way.  I wasn’t.  Or at least I wasn’t now, I never thought if I would have let him earlier or not, I’d just had other plans then, or so I told myself.  I spoke before he could ask, “Are you alright if we do it this way this time?”  

He looked surprised.  “If you want to, sure.”

Somehow it felt right to let him top now, at least just this once.  Maybe more often, if he wanted to.  I was flexible in more ways than one.  

*       *       *

So much for my theory that Jack had been traumatized by being raped; that, at least, he seemed to have let roll right off his back, no pun intended.  Somehow, as tired as we both were, we ended up going at it until almost noon.  By the end we had shed most of our clothes.  Jack somehow tended to keep at least one article of clothing on almost every time we’d previously had sex, even if that just meant that he left his boxers tangled around one knee or his shirt on one arm, but that wasn’t the case this time.  It was surprising to think how rarely I’d seen the man completely nude, or even just striped down to the bandages he’d had since we’d met.  Currently, bandages were all he was wearing, although the stripes of white over the mending gashes on his chest were significantly larger than the pad that had protected the machete wound on his arm.  I had nothing but my left sock, which actually covered less skin than all his bandages.  The man was an insurance nightmare; it was a good thing he had the money to handle all the hospital bills he’d surely accumulated, god knows I couldn’t afford them myself.  

Mostly because I’d ended up on my stomach with my legs half off the bed and my head resting near his chest, I kissed the nearest bandage, vividly recalling the claw mark I knew it concealed, although the image that came to mind was the deep and gory tear and not the nearly-healed stitched-up line that it was now.  “I take it you’re feeling much better now?”

Jack snorted.  “You mean after about a month in the hospital, recovering, or after sex?”

I grinned.  He laughed.  

“Where are you headed for Thanksgiving?”

Both of us flinched at the totally unexpected— and extremely distinct— voice.  I scrambled to sit up and drape one of the blankets from Jack’s bed mostly over myself.  

That creepy journalist stood in the doorway, leaning quite casually against the wall, his arms folded over his chest in a way that showed he was both unarmed and confident that he would not need weapons.  And he’d caught me on one of the rare occasions when my gun was not within arm’s reach.  Actually, I’d set the holster with my pants, on the floor directly in front of him.  There was no way I could get my gun before he would, so I just scowled.  “Yes, this _is_ a perfect time for that question.  _Clearly_ you’re not interrupting _anything._ ”

His steely eyes got a lethal glint to them.  Well, slightly more lethal than their usual gleam.  “ _Clearly_ I am not.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

I glared a bit more while, to my surprise, his expression became more neutral.  “I would have chosen a more opportune moment had one existed, however, by my understanding of your schedule, you plan to leave in less than ten minutes.”

By his understanding of my schedule?  How did he know my plans?  And ten minutes?

I glanced for a clock, daring to take my eyes off this home-invader just long enough to figure out if what he said was accurate.  It was.  In finding a clock, I realized that Jack, who hadn’t moved since the journalist had made his presence known, had not fainted.  He was just lying there, absolutely frozen in place, looking between me and the journalist without any obvious reaction.  Was this him having a flashback or something?  He hadn’t even pulled a blanket over himself, he was still completely exposed.  

It was mostly because of that that I intentionally shifted the blanket over myself to cover him as well, at least a little.  

*       *       *

I was thankful for the blanket.  At that point, pretty much all my energy had been split between willing myself not to get hard again and praying that my boyfriends weren’t about to kill each other.  This could easily become an orgy or a double homicide.  Probably the latter was more likely.  

Arcade stared Vulpes down for what must have been a full minute while I lay there awkwardly.  I think he expected Vulpes to do something— and so did I— but the enigmatic Legionary remained perfectly still until he broke the silence by repeating, “Where are you going?  I _will_ leave, once I have my answer.”  

If I knew, I would have told him just to avoid a fight, or the even less ideal awkwardness that would ensue if Daisy or anyone else barged in on us like this.  But Arcade hadn’t actually told me, and he certainly did not plan to tell Vulpes.  

“What the hell makes you think I’d ever tell you?”

Downstairs, somebody knocked on the door and Vulpes stepped towards Arcade.  

*       *       *

I fully expected him to punch me.  I had my body braced against the bed frame as much as I could without making it obvious what I thought he was planning, but the blow never came.  Instead, the eerie man (who stood almost eye-level with me given the height and size of the bed I was sitting on) only drew close enough to add to the effect of his surprisingly intimidating stare.  “You do not need to trust me, simply understand that we both have the same goal.”

“I highly doubt that.”

_Now_ he was about to punch me, and again, I braced myself.  Again, the punch never came.  His right shoulder had twitched dangerously, but he had stopped himself.  I saw his gaze flick to my right, where I realized abruptly that Jack had sat up.  He said nothing, and nude, heavily bandaged, and visibly exhausted, Jack hardly struck an imposing figure.  I found it hard to imagine the emotionally scarred young man ever posing a serious threat to everyone, but he had a strange and very solemn intensity to the stare he was giving the journalist that almost made me think he could take care of himself in a fight.  Well, clearly he could, sometimes, given that he’d killed men with his kicks, but I envisioned that fight more like a slapstick routine than an action movie.  It had probably been sheer luck that he even survived.  

Incredibly, the journalist took the slightest step back.  “I _will_ find out where you are going.  I have stopped having Jack followed, but that can change, I assure you.  I will not interfere with you so long as you tell me where you will be.”

I narrowed my eyes as there was another, more tentative knock on the door.  “Then why do you even need to know?”

He flexed the fingers of one hand irritably and glanced at Jack before folding his arms across his chest again.  “I understand that you do not trust me, but I _do_ intend to ensure Jack’s safety.  Tell me where you will be and I will not go there unless there are...complications.”

*       *       *

The doctor frowned, clearly baffled.  “`Complications’?  With what?  What’s going on?”  

Jack sighed.  “Arcade, I think we can trust him on this.  Can you just tell him, please?”  

I almost laughed aloud at the doctor’s expression.  He stared at Jack, clearly about to make some incredulous comment, but fell silent when he saw the way Jack was looking at him.  It wasn’t hostile, it was some subtle emotion I couldn’t quite place.  Possibly pleading.  He clearly believed that I had raped Jack, perhaps it was to avoid discussing this trauma openly that the doctor gave in.  “Tahoe.  We’re going to Tahoe.”  I nodded, accepting this answer, and turned to leave.  As I stalked down the narrow staircase, I heard him add under his breath, “And if you head up there, I hope you get caught in the biggest god damn blizzard of the season.  Or avalanche.  Or both.”

I smirked.  He was clearly unhappy with this situation.  I almost went back to explain that there had already been complications, and not just the ongoing complication that was the doctor himself.  


	25. Welcome to the Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The remnants aren't all fond of having Jack join them, although Johnson and Moreno aren't really fond of having each other there either. Jack's recurring nightmare persists, and he gets a surprising phone call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from the song of the same name by Avenged Sevenfold.  
> Also, I just want to say that I love hearing feedback and really appreciate any comments I get. ^w^

With the painting blocked off, I wasn’t particularly surprised when Vulpes left via the front door.  This, of course, caused problems because Daisy, baffled upon seeing him rush out, pressed inside, calling for Arcade.  My name was more of an afterthought.  Luckily we’d both expected this once Vulpes started for the door.  And luckily both of us, apparently, could get dressed exceptionally fast.  Arcade, however, was more nimble than I was.  Daisy ran straight into my house, presumably assuming that we’d been murdered or tied up or something, and while Arcade dressed and went to calm her down, I threw on my clothes and tripped pulling my socks up, crashing over my chair to the floor and halting Arcade in the doorway at the top of the stairs.  

Midway through a yell to tell Daisy that we were fine, he stepped back into the room and cut himself off.  “Jack!  Are you alright?”

I was more embarrassed than anything else, although I’d picked up several new bruises on the hardwood floor and furniture, but the crash of my fall and my quiet response meant that Daisy actually looked concerned about me when she rushed up into view.  

“Arcade?  Who was that man who just left?”  

Arcade explained what he knew about Vulpes, leaving out the fact that he’d been breaking in, implying instead that he hadn’t locked the door for the brief time that we would be here.  He also didn’t mention that Vulpes knew where we’d be over the holiday.  I grabbed my packed suitcase and got my shoes on while they talked, mostly hoping they wouldn’t ask me anything so I wouldn’t need to try to lie.  

*       *       *

There was a tense moment of Daisy eyeing me with concern, probably trying to convey that she felt the creepy journalist’s intrusion and the men who had been watching Jack in the hospital meant that the scotsman was bad news for me.  I bit back a frustrated sigh, too tired to deal with this right now.  Jack, luckily, was ready to go before I finished explaining, and I just had to grab my suitcase on the way out the door.  Hopefully I’d be able to sleep on the ride, at least if I was asleep, Daisy might postpone the awkward conversation until I was awake enough to deal with it.  

San Francisco was usually cloudy, but the clouds had been especially dark today and sometime between when Daisy rushed inside and when we left, it started pouring rain.  

Discovering this as we left Jack’s house, Daisy sighed.  “I sure hope it gets the wet out of its system now...”  I knew the feeling.  I’d checked the weather and there was a chance of a blizzard, potentially a very powerful one, the kind that might leave us stuck where we were going.  I wasn’t averse to being stranded in the mountains with Jack— that idea was quite appealing once the thought crossed my mind— but getting trapped in a mountain cabin with the friends who were the only family I had... well, let’s just say there were reasons some of them didn’t spend time together, and not just the reason we all had to be careful about how we stayed in touch.  

Daisy pulled up the hood of her jacket and set off down the stairs.  I could see a black hummer idling at the bottom, probably Johnson’s.  I guess my memory had been right.  

Jack stared at the rain for a moment, halted under the upstairs balcony as if afraid the water would melt him.  Figuring this had to do with one of his traumas, I waited at the foot of the stairs outside, also standing under the shelter of the balcony, but further down.  Jack stretched out a hand and tentatively let the rain run over his fingers.  

“It’s warm.”

“Yes.”  His tone conveyed no emotion, so I really had no idea why he mentioned the temperature.  “Is that a good thing?”

Jack nodded, smiling, but there was still that hint of deep sadness.  “I... don’t like cold water.”

“...Are you afraid you’ll catch cold?”

He tilted his head a little at that.  “That’s an odd turn-of-phrase, but no.  It’s not that.”

I’d phrased it that way because both Daisy and my mother had used that wording a lot; now that he pointed it out, I couldn’t decide if it bothered me or if I liked the fact that I’d apparently picked up some of their diction.  I almost asked why cold water bothered him as we walked down the stairs in the pouring rain, but once we were out from under the balcony, he looked too vulnerable.  Maybe it was just the way his hair darkened and his wet clothes really hung heavily on him, or maybe it was the water dripping down his pale face and off his eyelashes, or maybe it was just because his smile stopped reaching his eyes and he got that empty look again.  He seemed so fragile.  And I still hadn’t thought to ask why he’d been crying just before I asked him to join me here.  I hoped I’d remember to talk to him about that tonight.  

When we reached the road, we saw that Daisy already had the back open for us to load in our bags, she was waiting under the canopy of the open door holding some towels.  She caught the look in Jack’s eyes and her expression softened.  I think she’d planned to lead into some subtle implication that we weren’t right for each other, but decided against it, seeing him now.  I appreciated that she at least had tact, and she did care.  And she had valid reasons.  

Daisy set the towels in the back seat as the rain intensified to the point that drying off outside the car was completely useless.  At my insistence, Daisy got into the passenger side of the front, leaving me and Jack to put our luggage in the far back and take the back seat.  Jack loitered awkwardly beside me, dripping wet and holding his bag in a way that clearly showed he wanted to help, but had no idea how to fit it among the intricately stacked pile of cargo already there.  I smiled at him gently.  “I’ll do that, you just get in and dry off.”  

His lip curled in a relieved smile followed immediately by a flash of deep-seated fear that he then tried to hide.  “T-Thanks.”  He nodded and rushed into the car before I had a chance to ask what that terrified look had been for.  And then I realized: he was getting into a new car, driven by someone he’d never seen drive before.  Nearly killing him with my VW surely hadn’t helped his fear of cars, even if he hadn’t been inside it at the time.  I sighed, cursing myself for forgetting that about him, and tried to wedge our luggage carefully into the hummer.  

I noticed a huge black chest buried among the stuff already in the back.  So that was how Johnson had decided to hide his less typical supplies.  There was a pretty big cooler back there too, as well as the rest of the luggage, but this was a hummer; my bags and Jack’s fit easily once I found the right spot for them.  

With how hard it was raining, we appreciated the towels.  Inside the car, Jack had already dried off as best as he could by the time I got in.  He’d taken off his wet jacket and folded it on the floor between the two of us, leaving him in a black ACDC shirt that was still wet enough to cling to his body.  His tight jeans weren’t dry either, they really showed his legs despite the weight of the dark denim.  I tried not to look too closely.  

In drying himself off, Jack had rubbed his short hair into as wild a look as possible given its current length.  Actually, he looked adorable like that and I smiled just seeing him.  I couldn’t tell if his intention was to look amusing, or if he just hadn’t realized what he looked like.  His long hair had seemed to resist most styling— it lay flat, even when he first woke up, his hair was typically flat and neat.  Jack was already buckled in and subtly braced against the arm door.  He sat very still in his seat as I dried myself off, his expression a tense kind of stare.  

I dried off as quickly as I could so we could get going.  

“Did you boys get any rest since this morning?”  It was Johnson who asked, probably because he was wondering if I planned to sleep on the way.  

I shook my head, hoping he wouldn’t ask what we _had_ done.  “No.  We’re probably going to sleep during the ride, or at least I plan to.”  I looked at Jack.  That stare was far from drowsy.  His knuckles were white on the arm rest even though we couldn’t be moving at more than twenty miles per hour yet.  

Daisy, looking back as she often did while she was a passenger, caught Jack’s terrified stare.  I saw her instinctively scan the windows for the source of his fear, but I don’t think Jack noticed.  

“Jack?”  I hoped my voice sounded comforting and not worried, “It’s alright, Johnson’s a better driver than I am.”  Thank god Moreno wasn’t the one driving us.  

I wasn’t even sure Jack heard me, but then his eyes slowly focused.  He blinked and looked over.  “I... sorry.  I-I don’t mean anything by it, I just...it’s a different car and...everything.”  

Johnson, who was pulling onto a main street, answered kindly, “Haven’t had a crash in fifty years, trust me.  And if you can’t trust me, trust the hummer: it’s customized.  Armored body, steel frame, supposedly bullet-proof glass, but that’s harder to check.  Even if we fall off the road, you’ll be safe.”  

He said `fall off the road’ because that had happened— we’d let Moreno drive a few years back, and it hadn’t ended well.  He got aggressive and tried to pass on a narrow road at a sharp turn.  But I didn’t miss that the reference to that accident probably sounded a lot like the accident that had given Jack his PTSD in the first place.  He paled dramatically.  

Daisy was looking back at us again and she gave me a curious look, seeing Jack’s completely unresponsive state.  I held his hand, feeling the muscles completely locked into place.  I wasn’t really sure if this was a flashback or something else, but it was definately related to his PTSD.  “Jack, you’re safe.  I swear.”

His catatonic state only lasted a few seconds, but it was still disturbing.  Snapping out of it, he shuddered and I felt the muscles of his hand twitch and relax.  “Sorry...”  

“It’s fine.”

Jack stayed very still, saying nothing and avoiding eye-contact in favor of looking nervously out every window.  After a moment, we were merging onto the bridge and Daisy turned forward again to help Johnson navigate.  

I stared idly at the bay, trying to think of any way to comfort Jack more effectively.  A warm, damp pressure on my shoulder dredged me from my thoughts.  Jack had leaned over to snuggle against me and closed his eyes.  Well, I guess I wasn’t the only one hoping to sleep on the ride, surprisingly enough.  Maybe this was how he usually dealt with cars?  Or maybe I’d been more successful than I thought in calming him down.  Or maybe he was just so exhausted that, once the initial adrenaline ebbed, it was all he could do not to pass out.  His breathing was slow and peaceful by the time we got to the other side of the bridge and merged onto the highway.  

Daisy looked back again.  “Was that PTSD?”

She mouthed the words, either because she didn’t want to wake him or because she didn’t want him to hear, and I suspected the latter.  I nodded.  

“From you?”  She was still mouthing the words, and I answered in the same way.  

“No.  His dad.”

Daisy got a strange look.  She didn’t say anything, but I hoped she was starting to realize that, whatever our age difference, Jack and I had more in common than one might expect.  Although, admittedly, he was a lot more traumatized by his life.  Or maybe I was just very well-adjusted.  

Johnson interrupted, not realizing Jack was asleep or that Daisy and I had been talking silently, “You know, it’s going to be a long drive— especially if this traffic keeps up.  You boys can sleep, I can wake you up after we put the snow chains on, if you want.”

I nodded, stifling a yawn, “That sounds good, thanks.”  Jack had opened his eyes, listening and awake, but clearly still tired.  He went back to sleep as soon as I answered Johnson.  The cars around us were slowing to a crawl and I fully expected this drive to take eight hours or more, at this rate.  I’d better rest in case we had to swap drivers.  

~       ~       ~

At some point along the drive, I’d leaned to the side and wrapped an arm around Jack, so when I woke, the two of us were clinging to each other in what could only loosely be called a sitting position.  It was dark and it took me a second to realize what had awakened me.  We’d stopped on the side of the road with the car tilted slightly.  They were putting the snow chains on the tires.  We were close enough to the mountains now that the shoulder of the road had a huge pile of packed snow and the car sat on the edge of it, with one side higher than the other.  I’d probably awakened because we’d stopped moving.  

Jack was still fast asleep.  Well, aside from him, I was the most able-bodied among us, so I figured I’d get out and help Daisy and Johnson.  

I found Johnson swearing at the trunk.  Apparently, the four sets of snow chains had gotten tangled together with each other as well as a fifty foot length of chain he kept in the same emergency stash.  I helped him and Daisy untangle the mass of cold metal.  

“Sorry,” Daisy remarked, laying out the first of the freed tire chains along the back bumper before trying to separate another, “did you hear us in there?”  

“No.”  Actually, the hummer was surprisingly soundproofed, now that I thought about it.  “I think I woke up because we stopped; Jack’s probably still asleep.”

“Is he alright?”

“I don’t think he was sleeping too well at the hospital.  Most people don’t sleep well with all the activity and lights.”

“Arcade, I meant about earlier.  Was that just his fear of cars?”

“Yeah.”  I frowned at her.  She’d seen PTSD before, she knew the deal.  And hadn’t I already explained this?  “Why?”

“He looked upset on his way to the car.”

“The rain bothered him, for some reason.”

“Well,” Daisy pointed out, “there aren’t a lot of people who really like pouring rain, but we don’t look quite that upset when it happens.  Is that really all it was?”

I sighed, freeing the last of the snow chains and helping Johnson put the chest away again.  “Daisy, he’s been through a lot.  I think he has some trauma relating to water.  I know the car crash that gave him PTSD landed him in the ocean, so maybe that’s what it is, but I’m not sure.”  I stooped to get the snow chain mostly on the back left tire while Johnson did the same on the other side.  Daisy took a snow chain and moved around to the front on my side.  

“Arcade, he’s nice, but you say he’s had a hard life.  Are you sure it isn’t hard because he’s caught up in something a lot worse than either of you can handle?”

I had to get partly under the car to latch the chains, so Daisy couldn’t see that I paused what I was doing to rub my temples and sigh when she said that.  “Daisy, it’s mostly bad luck.  Do you really think being involved in something, probably something criminal, would lead to the guy getting attacked by a bear and hit by my car simultaneously?  Besides, you’ve seen him play cards.”

“He’s barely twenty-one, has no family, hardly ever leaves his house in the daytime, and he lives on the stairs.  He owns that house too, doesn’t he?  Do you know how he affords that?”

The chains were attached, so I sighed and got up, walking over to help her with the front tire.  “Jack isn’t a criminal.  I don’t think I could imagine the guy hurting anyone intentionally.  He’s just not cut out for that kind of life.”

Daisy gave me a very serious look.  “Then how does he afford to live on the stairs?  He owns a house in the best part of town, with no parents, no known job, and you _did_ find him beat up in the worst neighborhood in town when you met him.  Did you ever find out what he was doing there?”

We got that chain secured and I sighed again as I stood up.  She just wasn’t letting this go, was she?  At least I was awake enough now to concoct a decent defense.  “Yes.  He has no street smarts whatsoever.  And apparently he likes to wander cities alone.  You heard his story about Beijing, that’s pretty much how he rolls.”

She narrowed her eyes a little.  “Arcade, do you really believe that?  Are you sure he isn’t hiding something?”

“He _is_ hiding something— his traumas.  He’s been through a lot, and I’m not exactly in a position to blame him for not wanting to talk about his past.”

Daisy hesitated.  I could tell she really just wanted the best for me, but it was still frustrating.  I _didn’t_ know that Jack wasn’t hiding some kind of serious criminal past, I just trusted him.  

“Arcade, how does he pay for it all?  He’s college age and he owns a house, and in the city to boot!  And he must have racked up thousands of dollars in medical bills by now...”

Yet again, I had to sigh.  She really wouldn’t let this go.  I guess I just had to tell her.  I dropped my voice.  “Daisy...”

“I mean, he must be getting money somehow, and if he won’t talk about it...”

“Daisy, he writes porn.”

She froze.  The worry in her eyes started to turn to the kind of motherly outrage I’d pretty much expected.  Luckily, Johnson had finished with the other side’s snow chains and walked over to us as he wiped the slush off his hands.  

“Daisy, are we really in any position to criticize people’s professions?”

Daisy bit her tongue and frowned at him.  “Well it’s hardly a respectable career!”  She got into the hummer and shut the door, but that was probably more because she couldn’t do much more to help at this point anyway.  

“Thanks.”  

Johnson acknowledged my thanks with a smile and a nod.  “You’re really attached to him, aren’t you?”

I frowned a little.  “Uh...that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?”

Johnson shook his head.  “I just mean it seems serious.  More serious than usual, and to be honest I’m kind of surprised by that.”

I tilted my head.  “What do you mean?”

“I mean you don’t usually...  You invited him to Thanksgiving, and you’ve only known him a few months.  Most of the time you sort of seem to keep boyfriends at arm’s length, for lack of a better word.”

I raised an eyebrow.  Was he saying I was being too hasty?  I guess I did tend to remain sort of guarded, but with my history, I couldn’t just open up to everyone...although I probably could have been a _little_ closer without having to worry.  Jack just felt different, even if it was just because the circumstances had been so much more dire.  We’d both nearly died right after we’d met, and I guess that had gotten me past any fears I had about trusting him.  

Although I did find it a little odd that Johnson had brought it up like that.  I hadn’t gotten the impression that he disliked Jack, if anything Johnson seemed to be the most approving of our relationship.  

“I just don’t want you to get hurt.  Be careful.  You know what it’s like when people meet in stressful situations, and you’ve already had a lot of that with Jack.”

I hoped the twinge of annoyance that I felt didn’t taint my voice.  “Thanks.  I know.  I don’t think this is just attraction brought on by stress; this is more than that.”  I hoped.  

We paused, watching the traffic on the highway beside us.  I noted a state trooper parked about a hundred feet down the road, sitting in his car.  Was it just paranoia that made me think he was watching us?  

“Johnson, circumstances aside, what do you really think of Jack?”  

The old man got straight to the point.  “He’s a good kid, Arcade, but he’s way too young for you.”  I was surprisingly okay with this.  

Johnson gave the parked cop one very long, silent stare.  “You know Moreno would flip shit if he knew what Jack did for a living.  You might want to have some cover story, just in case he asks.”

I’d actually thought of that already.  Even coming here alone, I usually had to plan out some conversation to avoid with Moreno.  We didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye, so I mostly just tried to get along with him and keep my mouth shut.  I guess I was too similar to Johnson.  “I’ll probably imply that Jack’s a painter if he asks.”

Johnson nodded, still eyeing the car.  “Well, let’s hope that works.”  Moreno _did_ sometimes pry into things like this, and I knew he would if he realized I wasn’t being entirely truthful.  That was how he found out I was gay, actually, he kept asking if I had a girlfriend until I got sick enough to tell him a lie he saw through.  That explanation hadn’t exactly gone over well, either.  I glanced skyward.  And it really did look like a blizzard was coming.  

We got the chains on the rest of the way and continued.  Jack was still asleep when I got back in the car, although he’d shifted slightly to lean against the door.  The traffic got worse as we got higher, mostly because people were idiots and didn’t bring snow chains despite the fact that they were required on these roads in the winter.   It took another four hours until we got to the lake, meaning that we arrived around eleven at night.  

*       *       *

In that car, I slept better than I had in weeks.  Granted, a lot of that was probably because I spent most of the ride snuggled against Arcade, but it helped that my dreams centered on slot machines and casino games rather than repeating the recurring nightmare I’d been having for almost a month now.  I really didn’t need to relive that yet again.  

I woke up after dark while the car was stopped and empty and had a few panicked seconds before I realized that everyone was just putting on the snow chains.  I’d fallen asleep again before they got back into the car, but that was the end of my good dreams.  I must have slept dreamlessly for a few hours, or else I just didn’t remember my dreams for that time.  Then the nightmare returned.  It showed me what would happen, as always, but offered no hint, no reason, no potential way of stopping the events it foretold.  And this wasn’t the sort of thing I could easily stop.  It was too vague.  It didn’t tell me where, or when, or how, just what.  There was no why, nothing I could change, nothing I could fight, it just happened, again and again.  My worst fucking nightmare since I’d dreamt my father’s death, or maybe since I’d dreamt Vulpes’ near death, but I’d averted that.  This I couldn’t avert, or at least I didn’t know how.  I didn’t even know why.  I just knew what and, much more importantly who.  The culprit and the victim.  Or the beneficiary.  Culprit was an assumption.  Victim was clear, and obvious, and way too close to home.  Way too close to me.  

Why did I keep seeing this if there was nothing I could do about it?

I jolted awake in a cold sweat and realized that Arcade had been shaking me.  

“Jack, it’s alright, it was just a dream.”

I caught my breath and nodded.  “Sorry.”  I wish it was just a dream.  

He waited a moment and I felt Daisy looking back at me.  I wondered if she’d already realized how very traumatized I was or if it was only dawning on her now.  I really hated that she and Johnson had both seen me freak out like this, both now and when I’d first gotten into the car.  It made me sick with embarrassment, and a part of me wished I could just curl up and dissolve into the upholstery, but at least Arcade was here.  I found I was okay with it as long as he was with me.  It was the same way I’d been alright, for the first time, being openly gay, even dancing with a man when Vulpes was with me at the party.  I guess they’d both helped me with that in their own ways.  

Arcade slid his hand off my shoulder (where he’d left it once he’d shaken me awake) and rested it over my own hand, which was still white-knuckled against the edge of the seat.  I relaxed it under his fingers.  

“We’re nearly there, Jack, if you’re alright staying awake.”

“I’m probably better awake than asleep after that dream.”

I looked out the windows at the dark mountains and lake and the busy town.  It was weirdly stretched with how limited space was between the mountains and the lake; all the buildings, casinos, hotels, and restaurants were packed in almost exclusively along the same long road.  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been here, but I already suspected that my slot machine dream had been a premonition of the casino.  I felt almost surprised that I could dream a prediction that mundane and helpful.  

We passed the main town and Johnson turned the hummer onto a narrow gravel road I hadn’t even noticed at first because it was covered in snow.  There were recent tire tracks, but not many.  We followed the vague clear path through the woods and up an alarmingly steep series of switchbacks to get higher into the mountains.  At the top, I’d been expecting a secluded cabin but instead there was a parking lot.  It held one impressively buried SUV, one unidentifiably snow-covered sedan (which was more impressive by just having made it up here), and two other vehicles which were both clearly new arrivals.  One was an empty and very old pick-up truck which had probably gotten there earlier in the day and the other was a pitch black hummer that had clearly arrived only a few minutes before us.  The driver, a man fairly close in age to Daisy and Johnson, was making use of a full vocabulary of swear words in at least two languages as he struggled to arrange several dozen bottles in a cooler around everything it already contained.  

*       *       *

Johnson parked and Jack was predictably the first out of the car.  He started to approach Moreno as if to help him but hesitated, probably at the sheer venom of the man’s swearing.  Even as old as he was, Moreno didn’t need heavy artillery or any weapons at all to be intimidating.  _I_ was afraid to help him with all that hostility in his voice.  Well, it was probably just frustration, but I wouldn’t put it past him, considering we had all been riding in Johnson’s hummer.  And it was cold.  He’d never been very fond of snow.  

Noticing me and Jack while Daisy and Johnson unloaded the food and luggage from Johnson’s hummer, Moreno sighed and paused his consolidation of what he’d brought.  “Hey, Arcade.”  The others looked over at him, so he added, “Daisy.  _Johnson_.”  

Johnson gave him a nod, but didn’t take the bait.  Daisy was more friendly.  

“Good to see you, Moreno.”

Jack awkwardly moved to stand beside me while they greeted each other.  I picked up on a similar awkwardness among my friends, who were probably wary of giving Jack some accidental hint as to our shared past.  Luckily, Daisy broke the tension when she noticed the contents of Moreno’s trunk.  

“Jesus!  Wouldn’t two or three bottles be enough?”

Following her gaze, I realized that the bottles Johnson had been trying to fit in his cooler (whichI hadn’t really paid attention to) were all liquor.  There must have been five bottles of wine in three different varieties, six bottles of vodka, over a dozen of whiskey, and probably five full cases of beer.  Okay, admittedly Moreno was a heavy drinker especially around Johnson, and Johnson usually drank a fair amount as well, but the rest of us would be lucky to finish three wine bottles between us, judging from past Thanksgivings.  Moreno could have practically stocked a full bar from his hummer.  

Predictably, the cantankerous ex-soldier retorted, “Two or three bottles?  Like hell.  I’m not risking getting snowed in up here with you without a lot more than that.”  He shot Johnson a pointed stare.  Some people stock up on food before a blizzard, others hoard booze.  I guess it was typical of him.  

*       *       *

A roaring engine and the even louder sound of a Snowcat’s tracks reverberated through the parking lot.  I hadn’t seen a Snowcat since...well, since Siberia.  The enormous vehicle rumbled up and stopped where the pavement seemed to end.  Apparently I was the only one surprised to see it.  Moreno smiled slightly and remarked, “Oh, good, the Snowcat’s here.”

A woman of indeterminate age stepped out of the vehicle and trotted towards us.  She had wild hair dyed bright red and the kind of leathery skin that came from decades of heavy smoking, but otherwise she seemed like she could be almost my age.  The woman was bundled up in fur-lined winter gear, but beneath that it looked like she had on a lab coat.  She smiled, but it was the business-like sort of smile that receptionists gave guests.  

“Hi, the Doc’s a bit busy, so I’m here to drive you guys up to the lodge.  Name’s Calamity.”

“She’s my friend’s assistant,” Arcade explained quietly, “the one who’s a canine neuroscientist.”  Assistant was defiantly the right word.  Calamity, who’s name in and of itself appealed to me for a lot of reasons, was friendly, but not warm.  After some pretty basic introductions, she helped us load the luggage and coolers into the Snowcat and drove us farther up the mountain.  I was used to long rides in Snowcats and this one was probably the most comfortable I’d ever been in.  They didn’t bother me as much as cars.  

The ride wasn’t that long, we hardly rode ten minutes before we crested a snowy mound and came upon the lodge.  Amid the soft blue hues of the light reflected by the snow beneath the dark and clouded sky, the brilliant yellow glow of the lodge’s windows looked especially inviting.    

It _was_ a lodge, too.  Heading up here I’d expected us to be staying in a hotel or maybe a cabin, but this was a full-out lodge.  It looked like a repurposed resort, very woodsy but nice, and pretty big too.  Considering Arcade and myself and possibly Calamity were the only decently young people I wasn’t surprised that we ended up carrying the coolers, which were incredibly heavy, although I quickly realized that the others were a great deal more hearty than most people their age.  Moreno, for one, insisted on carrying as much as he possibly could and I quickly figured out that offering help would most certainly not be appreciated.  He sure seemed cranky, I was honestly surprised that Arcade even considered him a friend.  

After stowing the food in the lodge’s walk-in fridge, another man around the age of Daisy, Johnson, and Moreno met us in the hallway.  Everyone else exchanged pleasantries and I wasn’t surprised to be somewhat overlooked until the end.  I was just a little awkward with all this; I’d never actually met any friend’s family ever, and now I was suddenly joining my significantly older boyfriend with the friends who were essentially his family.  It was disorienting, but I tried to go along with things and stay out of the way as best as I could.  

Somehow the man in the hallway had the same friendly-but-not-warm air that Calamity had when he greeted me, but he’d had almost the same attitude towards the others.  He introduced himself as Judah Kreger.  

Before we had really left the hallway by the freezer, Daisy suggested going down to the casino restaurant later for dinner once everyone had put their luggage away.  Everyone but Calamity agreed; apparently, the unusual woman had to do whatever it was they she did for this friend of Arcade’s.  What exactly did they study within the field of canine neuroscience?  Or was it just general research in that field?  I was curious enough that I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to pry, and with how ridiculously secretive Arcade was about his friends, asking what they did could be a bad idea.  Even if I really couldn’t imagine how canine neuroscience could possibly be linked to something covert.  

Still, everyone but Calamity thought that sounded like a good idea so we planned to head back out in about fifteen minutes.  Daisy, Moreno, Johnson, and even Kreger all went off in different directions, seemingly quite familiar with the massive lodge.  Holding my suitcase, I looked over at Arcade.  He gestured to the left and we navigated the dark hallways to our shared room.  Most of the lights were off and when I asked, Arcade said his friend who owned the place lived alone, aside from Calamity, so he usually kept it dark to save energy.  I could see well enough, so I didn’t mind, and he turned on several lights along the way when necessary.  

“So...what do you think?  That’s pretty much my family, except for Doc Henry.”

I shrugged.  “They seem...fun.”

He frowned a bit.  “`Fun’?  That isn’t a description I expected.”

*       *       *

He shrugged.  “What did you expect?”

“Uh...actually, I’m not sure.”  I didn’t exactly go out of my way to have people meet my make-shift family.  I’d never really wondered what other people would think of them, but “fun” certainly wasn’t the description I would have expected.  

He fell silent, mostly looking around at the lodge as we walked.  I was surprised he hadn’t asked why my friend lived in such a massive home, but maybe Jack figured it was another thing I wouldn’t tell him.  It wasn’t; Henry just liked how remote it was and it had been cheap, given that isolation and the lack of any sort of access roads.  

In the silence, I almost asked what had upset him about that phone call in the hospital.  The thing is, he had been upset, and knowing Jack, I got the feeling that he might break down if I brought it up.  Given our previous discussions, if he talked about it, it usually seemed to help him, and I hoped it would in this case too, but we didn’t really have time for that kind of emotional roller-coaster considering how late it was and that the others still wanted to head back to town to eat.  Hopefully I’d remember and we could talk about that when we got back.  

 


	26. Welcome to the Family 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I broke the previous chapter in half...and it's still incredibly long, sorry. ^w^' The chapter title is part of the reason I didn't break it sooner, I was trying to keep all the "getting to know/meeting the Remnants" in the same chapter, but it looks like that isn't going to happen.

*       *       *

My phone had died at some point after I’d left the hospital, so the first thing I did in the room was plug it in and leave it on the bedside table to charge.  

The room was decently large, not the size of a suite, but a little bigger than my bedroom in the house I owned.  In general, it had the same rustic style of furnishings as the rest of the lodge.  There was one big bed piled with blankets that included a fairly basic red quilt, the two chairs were simple, mostly natural wood, and a taxidermy big-horn sheep stared down at us with a slightly dopey look to its glass eyes.  The place had an oddly charming dusty smell to it, like some childhood toy that had been sitting in the attic for ten years.  Under that was the smokey scent of whatever the lodge’s heater was burning.  All in all, it seemed rather cozy, and that impression was only cemented by the howling wind I could hear against the curtained window.  

“This storm isn’t getting here until late tonight, right?  Or better yet tomorrow?”

Arcade gave the window a worried glance as he set his stuff down.  “I hope so.  Otherwise we might be stuck in a casino for a while.”

I quirked my head.  “You don’t exactly seem fond of casinos.”

“I’m not.  I’ll never understand the appeal of giving away your money to the rich.”

I shrugged.  “I don’t have much interest in gambling, but I don’t really care one way or another.  If people want to lose their money, that’s their problem.”

He gave me a look like I’d suggested that Hitler hadn’t really been that bad.  

I continued before he could speak.  “Sorry, just...they’re doing it of their own volition, you know?  I mean, are  _you_  planning to stop them?”

He sighed.  “No.  I guess you have a point, but I’m still not happy about it.  Moreno gambles, though, just so you know.  He’ll probably do that tonight at some point, hopefully while the rest of us have something better to do.  I’ve learned I can’t talk him out of it.”

“...You’re a good person for that, for even caring enough to want to stop them.  Better than me, at any rate.”  

Arcade frowned.  “Why do you say it like that?  Jack, you’re not a bad person.  The one guy you killed was in self defense and it’s not as if you planned to kill him anyway.”  He hugged me because I guess he thought I was just getting depressed or being too hard on myself.  Did he really not realize how few morals I actually had?  Thinking back, I  _had_  wanted to kill those men who’d attacked me.  Legion men, in all likelihood.  I’d stumbled deep into their territory or something; I recognized the man I had painted from the strip bar that night.  And he seemed like he’d been there for some kind of meeting, he hadn’t shown any interest in the dancers from what I remembered.  Whatever the reason those men had come after me, I had loved that fight.  It had been painful, more painful than I liked, and I was pretty sure I’d nearly died, but I’d done a lot of damage in the process.  The idea that I’d taken a life had been more exhilarating than anything else.  Deep down, I was pretty sure that my morals line up a lot more closely with Vulpes’ than Arcade’s.  And Vulpes already knew I was involved with Arcade, would the charmingly idealistic doctor really be so forgiving if I told him the truth?  I was starting to think that I might be alright losing one of them now, as long as Rex survived.  My fear of losing anyone at all had started to fade just enough that I might handle a break-up in favor of getting closer to whichever man I chose.  I was even starting to think that Vulpes might be okay if I didn’t chose him, although the idea that we could still be friends if I ended our sexual relationship still seemed a bit too farfetched.  If I waited too long, I knew Arcade would figure things out and that might make my choice for me.  I definitely didn’t want that to happen, partly because I would rather end things on my terms, if I was going to end things, and partly because I was just a little afraid that would provoke a fight to the death between any combination of the three of us, but mostly, whatever my morals about other things, because I really didn’t want to hurt him like that.  Especially after the recurring nightmare I’d been having.  I still didn’t know what prompted that series of events, and I really didn’t want to risk starting it off with a break-up.

*       *       *

With how frequently some casual remark or event set Jack off, I was hardly surprised when he just stood silently while I hugged him.  He seemed lost in thought more-so than depressed and his eyes didn’t look quite as empty as usual.  Hopefully, this was a good sign.  I still didn’t know exactly why he’d been so touchy since I’d met him, and although I’d initially taken it to be a sign of his youth and traumatic life, I was starting to think that it more closely resembled the mental state of someone going through depression while grieving.  Granted, it seemed like I’d missed the first few stages and only caught him towards the end, but he was slowly getting better and I’d seen a pretty similar mix of emotions in people who’d been in the hospital after someone close to them had died, usually, ironically enough, survivors of car crashes that had killed the rest of their family.  Jack was seriously traumatized, but I’d met him near it’s worst, or so I suspected, and he was recovering.  I could deal with his unpredictable bouts of emotion if he was going to be a more stable person at the end of it all.  Not that I was sure I could have done anything else.  This disaster-prone, eccentric scotsman sure had me wrapped around his finger, didn’t he?

We kissed briefly —once he snapped out of it— before heading down to meet the others.  Riding back to town, a storm was clearly coming, but luckily it hadn’t started snowing just yet and the casino restaurant was still open.  Dinner itself was uneventful, the food was fine and there wasn’t anything notable about the restaurant.  The issue was conversation.  I couldn’t tell if Jack was still upset from earlier or if he was just being quiet because he didn’t know what to say.  Somehow Moreno and Johnson got into a heated debate shortly after we were seated.  Luckily the restaurant was mostly empty at this hour, so we didn’t need to worry about attracting attention, but knowing the two of them, a brawl seemed dangerously certain.  I hadn’t been paying attention to their conversation, but it sounded as if they’d gotten onto the subject of politics, as usual.  Judah sighed and waited.  He wasn’t their officer anymore, so he’d only really mediate if things got violent.  

Hearing their argument getting started, Daisy and I sighed in unison.  

*       *       *

I’d been watching Johnson and Moreno argue, but I looked back at Arcade with a slightly amused grin, hearing him sigh in unison with Daisy like that.  I guess she really was practically his mother.  

Looking back towards her end of the table must have given her the idea to strike up a conversation in the hope of drowning them out.  

*       *       *

“So...I don’t mean to pry, but how old are you, Jack?”  Oh, god, now she was going to  _subtly_  insinuate that he was too young for me.  Between her and Johnson and Moreno’s constant fights, I was starting to think that this had all been a huge mistake.  

Jack, to his credit, either didn’t notice Daisy’s likely motives or ignored them.  He kept his polite smile.  “I’m twenty-one.”  And I didn’t need the reminder of our massive age difference either.  Judah heard, but he was diplomatic and said nothing, as I’d expected.  He wouldn’t bring it up, even if he was silently judging me, and I appreciated, at least, that he kept his opinions on that to himself.  The other two were much too heated in their own debate to even hear Jack and Daisy.  

“Are you in college?”  

Jack shook his head.  “I spent a few years at university, but didn’t graduate.”

“Why?  What did you study?”  Daisy was practically interviewing him, which I had expected, but her questions surprised me.  If she wanted to remind me how different we were, I would have thought she’d stay on the age track, or ask him what he did for fun or if he spoke Latin or something.  Slowly, I realized what she was doing.  She didn’t know if he had other travel stories to tell, so she was trying to get another anecdote out of him and hoping it would distract Moreno or Johnson, ideally both, because of how vividly Jack told his stories.  Both the verbal, personal ones, and the written, fictional ones, actually.  Not that I wanted him sharing the kind of stories he wrote here, with my friends.  

Jack fidgeted at her question and lost his grin.  “I spent two years at Cambridge and then... well, stuff happened and I dropped out.  I was studying veterinary medicine.”  He faked a smile, but I knew him well enough by now to tell that he was faking.  His eyes had that same hollow look again and I realized that whatever had him so traumatized had been the same event that forced him out of college, or at least the two things were connected.  

For a second, I was actually afraid that he might break down or be prompted to break down by whatever Daisy said next, and she was about to speak, but I guess Jack noticed that he had to steer the conversation elsewhere, because he added, “Pretty much everyone in my family is either a doctor, an engineer, or some kind of scientist, with the exception of my dad and his brother, so my mother was always sort of expecting me to go into one of those fields, but there’s no way I could deal with human patients, so I thought I’d be a vet instead.”

Daisy frowned a little.  “What about painting and..writing?”

Jack shrugged, calming down visibly now.  “I like painting and writing, but I’m alright with science and I think I could have handled being a vet if things had worked out that way.  Though I  _would_  rather earn a living doing something a bit more creative.”

Judah chuckled, although he was still being friendly to be polite, so I wasn’t really sure what he thought about Jack.  “A writer, a painter, and a vet, you sure don’t specialize, do you?”

Instantly, Johnson and Moreno went silent and looked down the table at us.  As Judah was closest to their end of the table, I guess they had caught part of what he’d said, but not the context.  

Moreno frowned at Jack.  “You’re a vet?  What war?”

Jack’s expression hovered between amusement and awkwardness.  “Uh, no.  Veterinarian, not veteran, and not fully a veterinarian either.”

Surprisingly, Daisy cut in over Moreno’s disappointed grumble.  “You know, Doc Henry’s a canine neuroscientist, he’s fixing up your dog, maybe you can talk to him about that?”  I got the sense that she was trying to comfort him a bit.  Maybe something he’d said had gotten her to like him a bit more or maybe even almost accept my relationship with him.  Okay, the latter was a long shot, but the former could be true.  It was probably his schooling.  Actually, a lot of what he’d just said could have clarified how much Jack and I actually had in common, despite our age difference.  And I think he might have realized that he’d gotten her more on his side.  

*       *       *

At least Daisy seemed more friendly to me after that.  Johnson had been friendly from the start and Judah was completely an enigma, so Daisy and Moreno were the only two I was really trying to sway.  Well, Doc Henry too, but that would have to wait until I met him.  Actually having Arcade’s family on good terms with me seemed like a good idea whether for the short term of potentially getting snowed in with them or for whatever long term might happen.  Who knows, I had hopes, even if those hopes barely had a snowball’s chance in hell.  

As for Moreno, I was pretty sure I had an idea, although I felt like I’d pissed him off accidentally with that misunderstanding.  

After that, I shared some of my better stories while we ate, mostly sticking to the travel stories because I had so many of them.  Inevitably, someone asked why I had traveled so much.  It was Moreno.  

*       *       *

Jack shrugged, clearly just trying to gloss over an awkward answer.  I expected the basic “my family owns an island” explanation that he’d given me before, but this time he was more specific.  He gave me an almost sheepish glance as he explained, “My family’s always been very wealthy, and my mother likes to travel and took me along.  When I was a kid, she was one of the higher-ups at Poseidon Energy, so she traveled to many of their locations on a regular basis in addition to meeting people for work and inspecting some of their projects.”  

That was a lot more specific than just liking to travel.  And somehow I felt like it was even more relevant.  Poseidon had been in the news a lot lately, but I couldn’t remember why, even though I had the nagging feeling that it was relevant.  And I know I’d heard of a MacLean somewhere associated with them, but I guess it was a common name.  It was probably just a coincidence.  Even if it wasn’t, it could wait until we got back to the city; I’d look it up then just to be sure.  

The others all looked a little surprised.  Moreno frowned.  “Exactly how high up in Poseidon Energy?”  Before Jack could answer, the waitress came back to offer desserts, and we automatically shut up.  That topic was just a little too close to our own secret to discuss openly in public.  By the time she left again, the question had been forgotten.  

*       *       *

After dinner, Moreno wanted to gamble, as Arcade had suspected, so he headed off to the casino.  Johnson went to get the hummer to drive us all back and Judah insisted on going with him.  I got the sense that they had something to discuss, probably to do with whatever secret they all shared (Arcade clearly had his secrets, and with how much he hid about his friends, they were probably a part of what he was hiding.)  Or else Judah just wanted to take Johnson aside and privately rant about how insane Arcade was for dating someone half his age, or being gay, or bringing me up here.  I really hoped they just had something private to talk about.  

Even though the restaurant had been empty, the casino was packed and loud.  Daisy excused herself to go to the restroom, leaving me and Arcade alone with Moreno.  He had the games, so he didn’t bother talking to us, although he did pause to look around, apparently deciding which machine to try.  In the crowd, we decided to stick close, however little we liked Moreno or what he was doing.  The first machine was a complete bust three spins in a row and the cranky old man got up to pick another.  I went out on a limb while he was deciding and pointed to a slot machine a few rows up.  There was only one person in that whole row and it didn’t look like it had been used in a while.  I’d seen a machine just like it in my dream in the car.  “Why don’t you try that one?”

Moreno considered me, and then the machine, and shrugged.  “I guess it can’t be any worse than this one...”  He went over to try it.  While we followed, I caught a curious frown from Arcade.  

“What are you doing?”

I shrugged.  “I just have a feeling.”

Ahead of us, Moreno reached the machine and got the win just below the full jackpot.  

While Arcade stared in shock, the old man turned around and considered me with a new sort of appreciation.  “Well.  Damn.  Do you have any other good feelings about these machines?”

For the next twenty minutes, I guided Moreno through a series of slot-machine wins ranging from low to high level.  None were jackpots, but I didn’t want to draw too much attention.  None of them lost, either.  By the end of it when Judah and Daisy found and shepherded us out, Moreno was actually smiling.  “You’ve got some luck, Jack.  You should try gambling sometime yourself.  You are old enough, aren’t you?”  I caught Arcade’s grimace at that statement, but just smiled and nodded, as was my default reaction when dealing with people I wasn’t fond of but wanted to stay on good terms with.  He patted me on the shoulder, “Keep a hold of this one, Arcade, he’s a good luck charm.”  I’m pretty sure both me and Arcade felt that was a very dubious statement, given my luck in the past.  

I was grateful when Moreno moved ahead of me to get into the hummer.  This had gone better than I had ever expected, he actually seemed to like me more than Daisy right now, although I’d bet that fondness was temporary at best.  Still, having him like me superficially was better than having the man hate me deeply.  

*       *      *

Jack had actually gotten Moreno to  _like_  him.  I was stunned.  And what exactly had he pulled back there with the slot machines?  For the life of me, I couldn’t sort out how he’d done it; there were no cards to count and he certainly hadn’t been there long enough to have noticed a pattern in which machines paid out when.  The only thing I could think was that this was just more of his crazy luck, but he seemed to have expected what happened.  How could he have predicted that?  

It had started snowing by the time we were all back in the hummer, but luckily the weather wasn’t bad enough to slow us down.  We got up the hill and Daisy drove us back to the lodge in the Snowcat.  Back at the lodge, everyone dispersed to their rooms and most of my friends were too tired to say more than a quick good night.  

Once we got back to our room, I’d planned to ask Jack how he’d known which machines to pick as well as why he’d been so upset a few weeks ago when he’d gotten that phone call, but he quickly drove both questions from my mind.  

I’d barely closed the door when he pulled me into a passionate kiss.  I could tell exactly where he was going because he also slid one hand down my lower back.  Between the fact that it was nearly three in the morning and that he didn’t know if anyone could hear us— not that we were particularly loud— I really hadn’t expected this.  

He broke the kiss to frown at me.  “What?  It’s not like anyone’s close enough to hear us, right?”

“Um...no, they’re probably pretty far away and the walls are thick.  I just...didn’t expect this.”  But I really should have.  I mean, this was Jack, and given how massively prolific his erotic novels were...  

Jack grinned seductively, “Then let’s do this.”  He steered me towards the bed, pushing me back onto the blankets and advancing to straddle me.  

“Jeez, that month at the hospital sure left you with a lot of pent up libido, didn’t it?”

He chuckled and leaned down to kiss me.  “Oh, you have no idea.”  He hadn’t even started to undress yet, but I could feel that he was already hard.  I mean, I wasn’t exactly flaccid either, especially with him basically sitting on my upper thighs, but he was completely hard already.

*       *       *

I kissed my way down his chest, unbuttoning his shirt as I went and hoping we didn’t need to wake up at any specific time tomorrow.  Arcade slid his hands up my thighs to unbuckle my jeans.  I really should have worn my kilt, I thought, awkwardly dropping forward onto my elbows over his chest to struggle out of my jeans and shorts.  It was tricky to balance like that and I hardly thought the position was flattering.  

*       *       *

Jack dropped forward, balancing his weight on his elbows while he stripped from the waist down.  Around and beneath the bandage, I could feel the muscles of his chest tense and shift as he contorted his body to do so; at one point he arched his back and curled one leg so far back that I had to wonder if he was hypermobile.  If he was that flexible...damn.  I didn’t have any ideas right now, but damn.  He probably had more than enough ideas for both of us anyway.  

I opened my mouth to comment on how incredibly flexible he seemed, but at the same time he dropped his hips back onto my legs and rocked forward just enough to rub the tip of his cock over my fly as he reached down to unzip it.  I cut myself off with an involuntary moan.  

*       *       *

It was a lot easier to get his pants off.  Part of that was probably because he wasn’t currently kneeling, but it helped that I didn’t need to get them all the way off and as such didn’t bother to do so.  Being as flexible as I was certainly helped.  I wasn’t coordinated— as evidenced by the amount of times I tripped over my own feet on a daily basis— but I had always been very flexible.  I’d found out once that I could actually bend my back far enough that between my range of motion and how well-endowed I was, if I really wanted to I could just barely get my tip into my mouth.  But doing so for any length of time hurt like hell and the one time I’d actually done this lone enough to get myself off, I’d been practically hunchbacked for a week.  That week had really tested my ability to lie.  

I’d thought about how to use this quirk in actual sex (at least sex that didn’t just involve myself) and this was what I’d come up with, although I hadn’t been able to use it since I actually started having sex due to the sheer amount of injuries I kept getting.  This was the first time I’d been healthy enough to try it.  Aside from this morning, but this morning I’d been more tired.  

I shifted forward again, gripping his legs with my thighs reflexively, although it also helped me keep my balance while I curled my back forward and eased my hips up to press my erection against his cock so our tips lined up.  I grinned as I glimpsed the absolute confusion on his face before I bent forward and took both into my mouth as far as I could manage.  I guess there was some advantage to having short hair, because for once I could actually see what I was doing.  I barely got both our tips in before my spine reached its limit, but I doubt that made it any less impressive to Arcade.  Straining my back to hold myself steady, I explored our tips with my tongue, probing the warm skin and feeling him get fully hard while I did so.  

But I couldn’t keep on like that any longer.  I pulled off, gasping in a fresh lung-full of air after having been holding my breath all that time.  I felt like I was getting better at that after Vulpes.  Jeez, a few more years of sucking him off and I’d practically be an Olympic diver.  If it weren’t for the whole fear-of-cold-water.  

I shifted my whole body forward over the blankets, running my balls along the underside of his shaft as I got into position so he could thrust into me.  He’d propped himself up on his elbows when I’d curled forward, probably to get a better look, but now I took advantage of that and pulled him into a kiss, leaning back so he could sit up and hopefully have a better angle to thrust into me.  

Somehow my attempt to be sort of on top failed utterly.  I ended up completely on my back and we didn’t break our kiss until we’d both finished.  Aside from my bandages and his glasses, we’d both lost the rest of our clothes.  Between what we’d just done and the warm smear of my semen between us, we were comfortable, but I could already feel that if we stayed naked above the blankets for any length of time, we’d both end up freezing.  The heater was still running; I could smell it, it just didn’t keep the place as warm as I would like, or else the blizzard I could hear outside had overpowered the heater’s best efforts.  

I don’t think Arcade noticed how cold it was.  He lay with his arms around my chest, resting his chin carefully to the side of the bandage over the bear scratches and looking up at me contentedly.  I mostly figured he was tired, or just this happy due to of the cocktail of hormones that came with an orgasm, but there was an insanely optimistic part of me that believed that he smiled like that because he felt exactly the same way about me as I did about him.  

And I didn’t know for certain if I cared more for him or for Vulpes, I just knew they were both incredibly dear to me.  I’d have to decide eventually, hopefully before Arcade found out that I was sleeping with Vulpes willingly.  

I was just about to squirm free to clean myself up and put on my warmest pajamas when a jarring guitar riff made us both flinch.  My phone was ringing.  

*       *       *

Jack squirmed free and scrambled to grab his phone from the bed side table and answer it.  I sighed and checked my watch.  It was a little after four in the morning.  Who was calling him at this hour?  Then again, who was calling him at all?  I’d only seen him on the phone that night in the hospital, as far as I could remember.  He almost never got calls from anyone, and it didn’t sound as if he had many people who would bother to call him anyway, as unfortunate as that might be.  Then again, maybe the hour made sense.  If he did have people who called him, they were probably Scottish.  It was midmorning over there...right?  Calling now shouldn’t be too surprising.  At least it hadn’t been a few minutes sooner.  With how quickly he’d lunged for the phone, I didn’t want to find out if he’d actually stop sex for a call.  Then again, this was Jack, erotic writer.  Then again, this was also Jack, traumatized college drop-out who probably had some serious abandonment issues.  

I folded my arms under my chin and waited, figuring I’d be here in case he broke down rather than let him talk in private.  

Jack checked the number in the split second before he answered and I guess he recognized it.  “Hey, Millie.”  He smiled, but had such a confused look that I figured he hadn’t expected to hear from whoever this was.  

*       *       *

My ten year old sister was the last person I had expected to call me right now.  

“Are you having fun out on your holiday with your  _boyfriend_?”  She had that playful teasing tone she often got when she brought up anything related to romance, it was something a lot of kids seemed to do although Mila had never understood why other kids her age found the whole idea disgusting.  She’d grown up with a very practical outlook and I knew from her playful tone that she was perfectly fine with my sexuality.  Actually, she was acting like nothing had ever happened between me and my family, but that didn’t explain how she knew that.  

I stared blankly, almost forgetting she couldn’t see my confusion.  “How exactly do you know that?”

Cue ten-year-old giggle.  “I had a delightful chat with my half-brother, he told me all about it.  Were you really attacked by a bear?  Because that seems far-fetched even for you...”

Her half-brother?   _I_  was her half-brother.  Wait.  I wasn’t her  _only_  half-brother.  Her other half-brother was...Vulpes.  Holy fuck.  

“Wait.  He’s  _there_?  In  _Scotland_?”

She giggled again.  “No silly, you really think you could go all the way to America and I wouldn’t track you down?  You can’t get away from me that easily.”  Okay, they were definitely related.  

I sighed, “You tracked me down  _from Scotland_.  How?  Wait, where exactly are you now?”  

“We’re at your house.  It’s kinda dark and creepy.  You should really get some better lights.  Or windows.  Or something.”

I rubbed my temples.  “Mila Sorcha MacLean,  _how_  did you even get over here?  How exactly hasn’t mom found out and stopped you?  It’s— what?— a ten, twelve hour flight?  In total?”  Arcade raised an eyebrow catching on at least to some degree, although he probably didn’t know the half of it.  

“Sixteen hour, but I stopped for lunch.  Or dinner.  I’m not exactly sure.”

“Why isn’t mom calling you yet, freaking out that you’ve disappeared?  Wasn’t somebody watching you?”  

“I don’t know.  I haven’t heard from her in a few weeks, but she’s been busy lately.  Vance was watching me, but I told him I wanted to see you and I planned it all out myself and he let me go.  He was never mad at you or anything like mom is.”

“Is or was?  And I’m not surprised.  He was always kind of strange, I feel like he probably has darker secrets than I did.  He just threw you on the ferry and let you go?”

She giggled again.  “No, of course not.  He took me to the airport and then let me travel alone from there.  It’s perfectly safe; I’m very careful.”

I sighed.  “Right.  Because ten-year-olds are perfectly safe traveling internationally alone via flights they booked themselves.  How did you even get to my house?”

“I took a cab.”

“You took a cab, alone, from the airport when?”

“About an hour ago.”

“How did you get inside?”

“Well, I had a problem with that at first because I thought you’d be home.  I tried calling, but your phone was off or something.  You let it die again, didn’t you?  You know you really need to stop doing that, what if someone really needs to reach you?”

“Like you did?  Sorry.  I  _have_  been trying to keep it charged.”

“Anyway, I was on the porch for about half an hour, but it was raining.  Oh, and there was a weird guy making a phone call in your yard.  It was kinda creepy, do you know him?”

“Probably,” I remarked, thinking of Alerio and the other Legion men who’d been watching me.  One of them could easily have been assigned to monitor my house.  

“Well, I was only there half an hour and I was just about to try to call you again, but it was a nice night, it was soft weather like back home, you know?  But anyway, I was taking out my phone when this guy walks up and I thought he looked sort of like me, and he introduced himself and let me in.  I’m kinda shocked you’re only dating two guys now that you’re out of the closet.  What’s the other one like?  Have you had sex yet?  How many times?  What was it like?”

I heard a rustle on the other end of the line and Mila went silent.  A different, equally familiar voice cut in.  

“Your sister is incredibly precocious.”  Was it just the cold of the room that sent a shiver down my spine?  

“Oh...  Yeah, she does that, sorry.  Um...”  I wanted to ask what exactly he was doing.  I mean, if he was just being helpful and essentially babysitting my sister, that was fine, but this was Vulpes Inculta, so I really didn’t expect that to be the case...and I wasn’t actually sure that he even knew he was related to her, so she might very well accidentally provoke him or something.  He probably didn’t like kids anyway, even creepily intelligent ten-year-olds.  

“Do you actually believe that I would ever intentionally allow harm to come to my half sister?  What kind of man do you think I am?”  And he was a fucking mind reader.  Right.  Well, being honest here really wouldn’t help my case.  

“Um...sorry, wasn’t sure you knew...”

“Your mother’s interest in my father was quite obvious when we first met.  Besides, your sister is clearly related to both of us.”  He was right, she had his pale eyes and dark hair, but shared my family’s nose and hair texture.  The rest of her features were an even mix, and I had so little of my dad’s looks that her resemblance to both me and Vulpes remained quite evident.  

“Right.”  I had no idea what to say.  The idea of Vulpes and my sister spending time together, as siblings, I supposed, was fairly terrifying.  My sister had caused enough trouble in my life; I didn’t need him giving her tips.  And I certainly didn’t need her sharing any embarrassing stories, as she was quite liable to do.  

Again, he read my mind.  “She’s been telling me quite entertaining stories about you.  Is it true that you were once stuck in a cabinet for thirty-six hours?”

“Uh, yeah.”  Yup, I was definitely going to regret the two of them ever getting together.  

“We’ve been playing your games and I made both of us dinner.  I will watch her until morning, but then I must go.  I’ll find one of your local friends to care for her until you return, most likely one of the mechanics.”  

“Oh.  Yeah, that should be alright, sorry.”

“It is hardly inconvenient, I was aware of her travel plans and it is better that she’s out here anyway.  Besides, I enjoyed meeting my half-sister.”  

I heard rustling and, for a moment, I thought he was just going to hang up, but he passed the phone back to my sister.  “I can’t believe you aren’t home!  You  _never_  left our house, what brought this on?  Or did you just want a love nest where nobody would interrupt you?”  She had that joking tone again and I snorted.  

“Hardly.  It’s a holiday, and I don’t mean a vacation.  It’s like a big family meal kind of thing, and he invited me.”  Arcade frowned a little, tilting his head.  He was probably wondering if I was still talking to my sister.  Had he realized I’d been talking to Vulpes?  Probably not, but I didn’t know if he could hear the conversation or not.  

“Ooh.”  She giggled, “Does that mean it’s  _serious_?”  She was hopeful, not mocking, at least not primarily mocking.  

I laughed.  “Bugger off, I’m not discussing that  _now_.”  

She giggled again, seemingly realizing that I meant I wasn’t alone.  “ _Riiiight._   I’ll just let you get back to whatever you two were doing, awake, alone together, at four in the morning...  Good night, big bro.”  

She hung up the phone and I put it back on the table, shaking my head at the absurdity that my sister had dropped by unexpectedly and was now relaxing in my house with her homicidal half-brother.  

“Your sister got to your house?  From Scotland?  Does this happen often?”

I chuckled and rolled closer to him.  “Well, she once ran away from home to visit me at college, but tracking me cross-country is a level I didn’t expect.”  

He got an almost sad look that I quickly realized was apologetic, “We can try to head back tomorrow, if you want, but the roads might not be passable.  The Snowcat could definitely get us down the mountain, but after that—”

“It’s alright.  She’s not alone, she’s safe.  Besides, my sister’s been through some pretty rough situations herself, like nearly getting kidnapped in Paris.”  Come to think of it, I should have realized she and Vulpes were related even sooner, she’d taken down two grown men as a seven-year-old.  Honestly, she could be pretty terrifying.

Arcade gave me a skeptical look. “Your little sister is safe in the house where even the rapist home-invader thinks you need better security?”

I stared in shock.  Had I  _told_  him that Vulpes had been the one who’d raped me?  I mean, that first time, I guess it was technically rape even if later on I’d had sex with him willingly.  Now I was just in a fucked up combination of relationships by my own fault.  I guess Arcade had just figured that the guy who kept showing up in my house was probably the most likely culprit.  

*       *       *

I almost started to backpedal, but then I sighed.  I had to admit it eventually, right?  “That journalist who keeps breaking in?  He...he  _was_  the one that raped you, wasn’t he?”

Jack hesitated and then nodded.  “Yeah.  Sorry, I...I should have realized that you’d figure it out eventually.”

I had half a dozen things to say and they all sounded stupidly cliched.  I’d been trained, albeit briefly, in how to deal with rape victims because as a doctor who sometimes worked in the ER, people like that did occasionally come in for treatment, but it was different when it wasn’t some stranger on the exam table, probably different for both of us.  Now that I was dealing with my own boyfriend, all the things they’d taught me to say as a doctor just seemed like stupid lines from self-help books or the stuff therapists said when they couldn’t make the effort to care.  

So, somehow, after a moment of searching in vain for something comforting, I asked bluntly, “Jack, who were you talking to that night at the hospital when I asked you to join me here?  What was that phone call about?”

He’d been staring at the quilt, his expression hidden by the angle of his face, but now he looked back up at me.  I’d expected him to be almost to the point of breaking down or at least more sad than he looked, but he surprised me.  He had tears in his eyes, but he was actually smiling.  “My mom called me.  It was...it was kind of a lot to handle after everything that had happened between me and her and after Rex and all the stuff that’s happened since I got here.  I really never expected to talk to her again.”

Well, this was new.  I guess he really was getting better.  Maybe he wanted to talk about it?  Talking certainly seemed to help him and I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t curious.  Aside from their money, all I really knew about his family was that they were Scottish, well-traveled, and somehow involved with Poseidon energy.  And that his uncle was a slightly less sexy, much more enigmatic man whom I’d never even realized was Scottish.  And he lived outside Oakland; I’d certainly never guessed that the guy came from money.  At least Jack shared a little more information.  The corpse in his basement wasn’t his fault, and I trusted that I wouldn’t sudden;y discover that I’d been living with iguanas or something.  Jack shared the details that he could, or at least I trusted him enough to believe that was so.  

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He bobbled his head uncertainly and lapsed almost completely into his Scottish accent.  “I dinna ken.  You want to hear about it?”

“What actually happened between you and your family, anyway?”

He laughed.  Granted, it was a dark laugh, but laughing was a far cry from breaking down, like I’d expected.  “My family’s kind of religious.  I don’t think dad’s side was ever too bad about that, but it was really just him and Uncle Tea.  Mom’s uncle was a Bishop before he died and her family’s always been...well, massively conservative.  Bigoted, depending on perspective.  And they kind of like keeping up appearances.  Even my dad’s drinking was swept under the metaphorical rug for the longest time.  I kept my secrets for as long as I could, to the point of going to school as a vet, although I guess that wasn’t much of a sacrifice.  Actually, even though I wrote my books like crazy, as a teenager, I kinda thought I’d just...pretend.”

*       *       *

Arcade frowned slightly when I said that.  He probably could have guessed what I meant, but he wasn’t sure.  

I explained.  “I mean, I figured I’d still write, I could hide that easily enough, but I thought maybe I’d...well, appease my mother.  I thought I’d find some particularly stupid girl eventually, get married, and just write to...to work out my frustration.  Honestly, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone through with it, although it would probably have been the death of me, but things happened.  Veterinary school or maybe it was just Cambridge was a bitch, you probably understand, or maybe you don’t...”

Again with the frown.  “You mean keeping your sexuality secret or the schoolwork?”  I hesitated to answer because really, the answer was both, but he elaborated because I guess he thought I’d misjudged him slightly.  “I mean, I didn’t exactly stay in the closet very long, my mother and Daisy figured it out when I was thirteen, I’ve never been good at lying to them.”

I shook my head.  “I meant the latter.  College was...difficult.  I mean, I had expected that, but I wasn’t ready for the reality.  I’d always sort of coasted through classes— not that I was bad, just lazy.  I grasped the concepts easily and that showed from the projects I did, but the basic schoolwork was mediocre.  Veterinary school was just...grueling.  It didn’t help that I was adapting to just living away from home in the city at the same time that I was learning to actually be social for once and trying to figure out classes and how to manage my own time.  I...I guess I was never really the most well-adjusted guy, or else I just really can’t handle that kind of stress.  And some of my professors were good friends with my mother, so they’d send her news and then she’d call, asking why I’d missed class, or failed a test, or whatever.  I’m not trying to complain, it was just...a lot.  And I know what I did was stupid.  Most of what I did was stupid.”

*       *       *

I wasn’t sure what to say.  On one hand, he sounded like he was beating himself up, probably over something that was a minor mistake at best, but on the other I knew Jack tended to make stupid mistakes, some of which were a hell of a lot more serious than skipping class.  He’d also started to piss me off with the way he was talking about his college experience— it still frustrated me when he complained about things that came from his family’s incredible resources, like going to Cambridge for a decently advanced veterinary program while I’d struggled to even get a decent school for my medical doctorate and pretty much only made it because I worked hard, loved to learn, and was already pretty intelligent.  But, I still knew that especially in very competitive schools and during freshman year, a large number of students failed classes or even suffered mental breakdowns due to stress.  And Jack had probably already been through a lot by then.  Add PTSD and possible insomnia and night terrors to the grueling adjustments of normal college life and I could easily see him breaking down.  

He had to stop his explanation to calm down again, so, because I was starting to suspect that he’d be crying by the end of this and because I couldn’t actually reach him from where I was anymore, I got up and walked around the bed to sit beside him.  

When Jack could continue, his eyes were watering and his smile was gone.  I could hear how close he was to breaking down when he spoke.  Jeez, even if I hadn’t decided to date him, he needed someone and he clearly had no one else.  His sister was half his age and the rest of his family had apparently abandoned him.  I got the sense that he didn’t have any close friends either, but my closest friends were probably Daisy and Johnson; Garrett, my other exes, and my coworkers had never really been the kind of people I confided in.  I guess that had almost changed with Jack.  I mean, I’d learned a long time ago that it was a bad idea to really be open with boyfriends, but something, probably the dire situations we’d already been through together or maybe just his own desperate need to work through his emotional trauma had led me to be much more open with Jack.   It scared me a little to realize that.  

“I...”  His voice caught in his throat and he waited another moment before he could change tacks.  “Do you remember that painting I did in the hospital?”

“The animal?”  I hadn’t seen the other one, honestly I didn’t know that they weren’t both animals, but I wasn’t sure what species the one I’d seen had been, or I would have been more specific.  For all I knew, he was painting prehistoric creatures again.  

Jack nodded, so I guess I’d been clear enough.  “What do you remember about it?  Did you look at it closely?”

It didn’t take long to guess where he was going with this.  I’d thought it was some kind of memorial, but maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was just a visual representation of whatever he’d been through.  “Yeah.”  I thought back, trying to picture it.  I wasn’t exactly the most visual person.  “Well, it was...some kind of carnivore, maybe a canine?”

“Tasmanian Tiger.  Or Tasmanian Wolf.  Whichever name you might have heard.”

“Neither.  Then again, you  _were_  learning to be a vet, I’m not surprised you know more about animals than I do.”

“It’s a relative of the Tasmanian Devil.  They went extinct in the thirties, but they were fairly unusual predators.  They went extinct mostly due to hunting encouraged because they were considered a threat to farmer’s chickens, but the photo used to make this claim was faked.  The species is somewhat relevant.”  I hesitated and so did he before prompting awkwardly, “Did you notice anything else about the painting?”

I sighed.  He was being annoyingly vague, but I guess this was too painful for him to just explain plainly.  “The Tasmanian Tiger was falling.  Or maybe jumping?  It was in some city, London if I had to guess...  There was something behind it, like an archway, or...”  I placed the stone structure quite suddenly.  I hadn’t actually seen one like that except in pictures and the angle had thrown me off when trying to identify it.  “It was a bridge.  The tasmanian tiger was jumping off a bridge.  Was that ...was that supposed to represent you, Jack?”  If he was trying to admit that he’d tried to kill himself...well, it made sense why he’d been so vague about it.  And I wouldn’t be surprised, given all he’d been through and his morbid art.  

Jack started to shake his head, and then hesitated, and then nodded.  “The Tassie doesn’t represent me.  It’s Ven.  I...I met him in Cambridge.  He saved my life.  Things... went bad.  Very bad.  I had a mental breakdown and was sent home in the hopes that I’d recover.  My mom asked me what had happened.  Needless to say she...wasn’t fond of the truth I told her.  She freaked out, we had a fight, she berated me for never having a job, and I stupidly I told her about my writing.  She disowned me.  She kicked me out and most, almost all of my family cut ties with me and I hitchhiked to London.  I didn’t have my wallet when she’d kicked me out, and she didn’t let me get anything I hadn’t already had ready to go, so...so I was sort of homeless for a while after Ven died.”

*       *       *

Arcade stared at me.  For several seconds, I was teetering on the precipice of tears, but not, to my great and well-hidden surprise, another emotional break down.  In those seconds while I wasn’t quite crying, my vision was clear enough that I could watch his expression and for once I felt certain that I knew the thoughts going through his mind.  He now understood exactly why I was so messed up, or at least a large part of it.  

“Jesus Christ, Jack how quickly did all this happen?”

*      *       *

He looked sort of vacant and I realized he was thinking.  I guess he hadn’t actually considered the chronology of it all.  “Three days.  Sunday he died, Monday I was such an emotional wreck that college sent me home to recover, Tuesday...Tuesday mom kicked me out.”

Okay, a part of me wanted to punch his mother for putting him through that, but if he’d reconciled with her, then I’d follow his lead.  Not that I was above slapping her if she acted like she’d been right to treat him that way.  I could really understand why he was so messed up now, knowing he’d had to deal with all that in such a short period of time.  And judging from the state he’d been in when I’d met him, I suspected that his house on the stairs had been the first decent place he’d stayed at since then.  I’d met Jack the first day after he’d been homeless.  

He started crying uncontrollably and I hugged him, realizing to my surprise that he wasn’t anywhere near as upset as he had been all the previous times he’d broken down.  He was just crying, not sobbing to the point that he could hardly breathe or quivering because all his muscles had gotten painfully tense.  He didn’t have that empty stare I’d seen in him so many times before.  He was definitely getting better.  His eyes were open and he hugged me back.  

Jack only cried for about five minutes before he calmed down and just held onto me.  Once he seemed reasonably calm, I asked softly, “She called you?”

Jack nodded.  “She...I guess she wanted to apologize.”  

“That’s...good.”  It was kinda surprising, really.  The way he described his mother, she sounded a lot like Moreno; the idea that she’d ever apologize about something she saw as a moral affront sounded absurd, but I guess everyone had some capacity to forgive.  

Apparently, Jack realized why I seemed confused by his statement.  He smiled.  “She said something about having had a close call, so I guess I can thank some assassin or a plane malfunction for her unprecedented forgiveness.  She asked how I was and I guess I was kind of harsh at first, after the last time I’d spoken to her, so I summarized pretty much everything whereas I would have probably glossed over some of it a bit more if I hadn’t been fairly pissed off.”

I briefly wondered what “details” he’d included that he might otherwise have left out.  Knowing what Jack wrote, and the nature of the things his mother apparently found repellant about him, I had a suspicion.  Whatever came of this relationship, I was a little disturbed to think that he might have described our sex life to his mother, probably in vivid detail.  “So...things are fine between you two all of a sudden?”  That idea was a little frightening as well, or at least one possibility bothered me more than I wanted to admit.  He was still just twenty-one, it wasn’t out of the question that if he was on good terms with his family again, he might move back to Scotland.  And if that happened, I’d miss him.  

Jack shrugged.  “She doesn’t seem upset with me anymore, or at least her apology seemed genuine.  But, she said she’d call me again, and she hasn’t so maybe that first call was just temporary insanity or something, I don’t know.”  

He started to look sad again, and I tried to head it off.  “She’s probably just busy.  I got the sense that she didn’t exactly let your sister fly off to see you either, so it doesn’t sound like you’re alone in not hearing from her.”  

Jack nodded.  “You’re probably right.”

He relaxed and I checked my watch.  By then it was five thirty in the morning and I’d need to start cooking around eleven.  Considering I also needed to shower and eat breakfast at some point, I was probably looking at four hours of sleep.  Although, given the size of the kitchen, once everything was in the various ovens I could probably take a nap.  Jack was already asleep before I went back to the other side of the bed to join him.  In retrospect, I could never have guessed how dramatically Thanksgiving day would change his mood, for a lot of reasons.  


	27. The Call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving is going great until Jack gets another fateful phone call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song by the Backstreet Boys...yes, because 90s. >_>  
> Also, I know these chapters are coming together quickly all of a sudden, I'm in a writing mood and have suddenly found free time.

The alarm I’d set didn’t wake me, but Jack did.  I guess the phone alarm might have roused him just enough that his nightmare broke the paralyzing grip of sleep.  I woke to him thrashing about in a cold sweat and mumbling frantically.  Between his accent and the fact that he was still asleep, I couldn’t catch much of what he was saying beyond the words “no” and “don’t.”  Even without that, it was obvious that this was a nightmare.  

“Jack!”  I shook his shoulder, jolting him awake and apparently startling him so much that he sat bolt upright and nearly leapt to his feet on the bed.  In one last sleep-addled murmur, I caught a word I almost recognized.  I frowned.  Had he really just said `viscera’?  Or visceral?  The latter probably made more sense.  Unless this was a trauma of his. 

He got very still, staring at his hands as his breathing went back to normal.  He looked shell-shocked.  

“Jack, it’s alright, it was just a dre—”

As if he’d only just realized I was there, he turned and grabbed me in a tight hug like he hadn’t seen me for ages.  I only realized when he started shaking that he was practically in tears.  

“I-It was so real...oh, god, it was so _real_...”  

...Okay.  Well, I suppose it made sense that someone as traumatized as Jack would have truly horrific nightmares that would do this to him.  And this hug was probably going to bruise my ribs.  I guess my own bad memories weren’t quite this horrific, or at least the horrific ones weren’t personal.  Some of the people we got in the ER of a large city hospital were pretty mangled up, but I hadn’t yet come across anyone I’d known like that; my nightmares were all close calls with my family.  Jack’s were probably much worse.  

I hugged him until he calmed down.  I didn’t want to try to speak until he loosened his grip enough that I no longer needed what little air I could get to breathe, and it took him a while to realize how tightly he was clinging to me.  I didn’t want to ask what he’d dreamt, but on the other hand I was too curious not to.  I convinced myself that it might help him.  

“Jack...what did you dream?”

For a long moment he stayed perfectly still, his head buried in my shoulder.  I almost thought he hadn’t heard me.  He spoke very quietly when he finally answered.  “You really don’t want to know.”

Well _that_ was incredibly creepy.  Alright, Jack, I won’t ask.  I’ll just speculate.  Wildly.  

The fact that he wouldn’t tell me added to my suspicion that his dream had been about me.  Given his fear of loss, I guessed that this nightmare had been brought on by that fear and involved some horrific vision of my death.  At least that seemed likely, and it seemed to explain the reason he’d hugged me so violently as soon as he woke up.  

*       *       *

My nightmare had been a lot worse that morning.  I think I was hurting Arcade with my grip, but I was just glad he was here and, more importantly, alive.  I’d already watched one boyfriend die and I didn’t need to repeat the experience.  Especially not the way I’d just seen.  

My dream had changed this time.  It was still, as always, a prediction, I knew that now.  I could feel that it would always reveal one possible future, all my prediction dreams would always do so.  Usually, they only showed one possibility, but sometimes, very rarely, I could lucid dream within a prediction.  I’d known I could lucid dream for years, and I had done so in prediction dreams before, I just hadn’t realized that the dreams had any real significance, and as such hadn’t done anything productive.  

Now, thanks to that kid, I knew these dreams really did predict the future.  Somehow.  I don’t know, maybe I’d gotten a bit too much radiation in my childhood of broken bones and following my mother around power plants.  At any rate, I should probably thank him if I saw him again.  

The problem was, I couldn’t lucid dream at will, so usually my dreams would just show what they showed and there’d be nothing I could do to see how things might change if I acted differently, if the predictions even worked that way.  For all I knew, these were set events that would always unfold as they appeared, but I didn’t want to believe that.  I had changed them before —warning Vulpes to avoid work on the day his office was bombed— it just hadn’t been in the dream.  This latest recurring nightmare was not a future I was willing to accept, and by some twist of fate or fortune, I had managed to lucid dream.  Actually, I’d probably felt Arcade waking up or just been roused by whatever I was doing that had awakened him.  I’d probably kicked him again, actually.  

Lucid dreaming, I had known how the dream usually unfolded, known where the events I was viewing were headed, and as such, I had forced the dream view back to my body, tracking through the streets and days back to my house, where I was alone.  From there, no longer aware of the situation as it unfolded where I had been viewing it before, I ran to stop it.  The dream, like all my prediction dreams, had been so vivid that I could hear Gibson’s pack of dogs barking as I ran past and catch her calling after me when I sprinted by and ignored her.  I could feel the impact of each hurtling step and the biting chill of the foggy morning.  As I got closer, I could smell the stink of the city sea.  Among other things.  I’d been near this place before in waking life and I’d never forget the smell, even if I hadn’t been here exactly.  Remembering from the dream, my sense of direction was skewed and I wasted precious seconds finding the right building.  It wasn’t guarded because something had happened, and walking inside, the distracted guards saw and did not stop me.  They knew me somehow, although I did not know them.  

I barely saw them.  My attempt to alter the prediction had failed, now instead of seeing the end as if watching a film, I felt it as if I had lived it.  I could smell the blood so clearly that I could taste it.  It slicked my hands so that what I caught and held, already slippery, slid from my grip to the crimson carpet below.  Someone yelled in rage, but I was the only one crying.  

It took me a while to shake the image from my mind enough to fully let go of Arcade, who sat back and stared at me, clearly disturbed by how shaken I appeared.  “...are you alright?”

Not really, but I nodded anyway.  I prayed I could change the events that dream showed, but wasn’t sure if I really trusted myself to manage it.  I doubt Arcade could, or I’d warn him, and I doubt Vulpes would be willing to try.  I guess the most I could do right now was try to forget it.  I’d probably dream the same thing tomorrow anyway, hopefully I’d be able to lucid dream a better outcome.  

Awake and more than a little afraid to sleep, I got shakily out of bed to shower.  I’d been so disturbed by my dream that I guess it had triggered my PTSD; my muscles were tense and my legs couldn’t move normally.  Getting out of the bed, I tripped on the blankets and Arcade caught me.  “Jack, I’m guessing you don’t want to go back to sleep after that, right?”

I nodded.  

He kissed me and hugged me again.  “Calm down.  I’m right here, and you’re safe.  Look, my friends aren’t the best cooks, so I usually spend most of today in the kitchen and was kind of expecting to do the same, but I can ask someone else and we can stay in here for a while, or would you rather help me cook?”

*       *       *

Considering the guy got so involved in writing and painting that he didn’t eat, I got the sense that he dealt with trauma by doing things.  Hopefully cooking might take his mind off whatever dream he’d had, or at least that was my thinking by suggesting it.  

He smiled and snuggled against me.  “You know me too well, I’d love to help you cook.  It’ll help keep my mind off...things.  Hopefully.”  What an optimistic endorsement.  

Jack didn’t mention his dream after that.  Cooking seemed to help distract him, and soon enough he was actually smiling and acting normally.  As untested as his cooking skills had been, he turned out to be fairly good at it.  It wasn’t as if he was a culinary genius or anything, but he wasn’t a _bad_ cook.  And as long as it helped him calm down, I’d happily delegate as many tasks as he liked.  I’d been coming up here most major holidays and, as I was the best cook by far among my old friends, I was usually left to my own devices until it was time to eat.  I’d never really been much of a people person and even being social with them got tiring after a while, especially when Johnson and Moreno started arguing, as they inevitably did every time.  Jack was one of the few people I didn’t get tired of talking to, although maybe that was just because he didn’t talk all that much either. 

Between the fact that my friends usually left me alone until almost dinnertime and the fact that I suspected they would give me extra time alone with Jack, both because I was dating him and because they weren’t all that trusting of him, I wasn’t surprised when nobody even checked in on us until five in the evening.  

By that point, I was exhausted and Jack had that kind of vacant twitchiness that came when one really needed sleep but refused to get it.  We hadn’t had time to nap, but judging from previous Thanksgivings, we wouldn’t be staying up very late anyway.  Actually, with how little sleep the two of us had gotten, I wouldn’t be surprised if we both just dozed off after dinner, although I hoped that wouldn’t happen.  

Daisy was the first to check in on us.  She had probably been about to say something different, but when we turned to look at her, she cut herself off.  “Goodness!  Did either of you sleep at all last night?”

Okay, I guess we looked more exhausted than I’d realized.  

*       *       *

Going off my first instinct from dealing with my mother, I’d been about to make something up, but Arcade’s awkward look clearly told Daisy why we were tired before I had the chance to lie.  

She raised her hands and sighed.  “Alright, I don’t want to know.  Just so long as you’re both okay to cook.  I don’t want you falling asleep during dinner, either.”  

The pot of water I’d been heating had just started to boil, so I got back to cooking while Arcade, who was currently chopping and peeling apples— which wasn’t time-sensitive— chatted with Daisy some more.  It was an enormous kitchen that had clearly once served a relatively large ski resort, so where I stood at the stoves left me too far away from Arcade to overhear them.  I figured they were either just catching up or she was criticizing his choice of boyfriend again.  She was nice, at least, and polite, and I got the sense that she didn’t disapprove of me except in my relationship to Arcade, but it was still frustrating.  It didn’t help that her attitude reminded me so much of my own mother.

It took a few more hours for dinner to be ready and when it was, I helped Arcade move everything to the dining room.  None of the others were there just yet and in the enormous resort, having just one table, even one very long table looked strange in the spacious room.  Towering windows gave a spectacular view of the lake and mountains.  The lights of the casino and town below could be seen through the flurries, but thick clouds left the sky a mystery.  I couldn’t be sure if the sun was still up or not.  The thick snow outside seemed to glow, but indoors there were barely enough lights to consider the dining room lit.  Shadows hung like curtains around the walls and unlit fireplaces.  The dining room had clearly once been the lobby, so it was a fair distance from the kitchen and we needed multiple trips to get everything out there even with a few of those restaurant food carts left over from when the place had really been a resort.  

We made the first few together because it wasn’t the easiest path to navigate and I didn’t know the place well, but when we brought out the second to last load, we found that the others had arrived, or rather most of them had.  Judah and Daisy were chatting with another old man who wore thick glasses.  I hadn’t seen him before, but I figured this was the neuroscientist Arcade had mentioned.  They seemed to be chatting about how he’d been and as Arcade hadn’t seen this guy yet since we’d arrived, I figured he probably wanted the chance to join the conversation.  I started back towards the kitchen and stopped him when he reluctantly turned to follow.  

“I can fit everything on one cart; I know the way, too.  You stay and chat, I’ll go get the last of the food.”  

“...Alright.  Thanks.”  He went over to join the conversation and I headed off down the dimly lit halls.  

The food was where I had left it and, for the sake of not wasting electricity, I turned off the lights as I loaded the cart to leave.  Even though nothing had been moved, in the enormous kitchen, I had the strangest sense that I was being watched.  It was less that terrifying chill like icy fingers down my spine, but more a nagging notion, like I was forgetting or failing to notice something important.  I looked around.  In the mostly dark room, I saw nothing but the cleaned tables and fixtures.  The room was still and empty, nothing seemed to move even in the dark spaces between cabinets and ovens.  I dismissed it as paranoia brought on by my past and nightmares and headed back towards the dining room.  

As I walked down the hall, my mind wandered.  I still felt awkward here, I still had no idea how to act around these people and I kept getting the sense that they were almost as awkward around me.  And the idea of maybe, someday, introducing Arcade to my mother seemed even more daunting.  In personality, yes, they were...well, they were nearly identical, but they were both so opinionated and I knew that neither of them were likely to back down on a moral argument.  It was a prospect as terrifying as it was tantalizing.  I _wanted_ something serious.  Even if I didn’t know for sure yet whether I wanted that with Vulpes or Arcade.  Well, I wanted it with both of them, but could only really have one of them after a certain point.  Not that I was even sure I’d be ready for that kind of commitment right now anyway.  Heck, I wasn’t sure if either of them would be ready for that or even if Vulpes would have any interest in commitment.  He was...strange.  I really didn’t know his views on such things, or what he had in mind as far as future plans and I’d been too afraid to ask.  He was defiantly intimidating.  But I would have to ask eventually.  Maybe, if he was in a good mood the next time we were alone together, I might ask what exactly he had in mind with this relationship.  

I guess the main reason I was even thinking of romantic commitment was the fact that, surprisingly, it seemed like my mother might be able to accept my sexuality, maybe she even did already.  For some reason the implications hadn’t fully clicked when she’d called, but after Arcade had brought it up last night, I’d been thinking about what reconnecting with my family could mean.  I could go home, I guess, if I wanted.  I missed Scotland.  I missed my family’s home.  But I also loved this country, not to mention everyone I’d met here since I’d left.  It was dangerous, but then again I could have found danger in a padded bomb shelter.  I didn’t want to leave the new life I’d found here.  

As lost in my thoughts as I was, I didn’t notice I wasn’t alone until the man beside me spoke.  “You alright, Jack?”

It was Johnson.  I guess his room was somewhere near the kitchen.  I nodded.  “Yeah, just bringing out the last of the food.”

“Alright, you just seemed distracted, that’s all.”  I got the sense that he had something more to say, but he fell silent.  

“I am a little distracted.”  I meant to stop there, but blurted out, “My mother called me a few weeks ago.  I...I wasn’t on good terms with her, but it sounds like we’re okay again and it’s a lot to take in.”  Why was I telling him this?  I wasn’t the sort of man who just told everyone I met about my personal life!  Besides, I’d already talked to Arcade about this...but it was on my mind and nagging like, well, like my mother herself.  

Johnson nodded.  “Sounds like a lot to take in, but that’s good, right?  You should be on good terms with your parents, if possible.”

After a moment, I nodded.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I guess you should be.”

He nodded and looked like he was trying to think how to lead into whatever he had to talk to me about.  Before he could find the words, his relationship to Arcade led me to a question of my own.  “You guys are Arcade’s only real family, aren’t you?  Why?  How?  What happened to...to his parents?”  It seemed too invasive, I realized that after I said it.  Wasn’t it prying to ask this?  And I wasn’t even asking Arcade directly, but he seemed so touchy about it...  I think I remembered him telling me that his father had died when he was young, but what of his mother?  He was somewhere in his thirties, so I guess she could have feasibly died as well, but it seemed a bit weird.  I mean, I guess they could have both died in car accidents or of some illness or something, but the odds of them both dying coincidentally seemed a bit high...  And as I was not only sleeping with the man but joining him on a holiday he considered so family-central, I felt justified in my curiosity.  

Johnson hesitated.  “They’re dead.  Look, you should really ask him that.  Daisy, the others, and I were good friends with them, so we’re sort of the only family he has left.  He grew up knowing us and he’s kept in touch.  Daisy said your father died when you were young and so did his.  I don’t think he really remembers his dad, but he was a good man.  A good soldier, too.  He’d be proud of Arcade and I don’t think he’d mind you either, from what I know about you.”

“He was a soldier?”  That was the first I’d heard about any of them being military except Daisy.  But the slang Daisy had used was also pilot slang.  Heck, it was sometimes used in other settings too, I’d just presumed military.  She had some kind of military air and now that he mentioned soldiers, they all did.  Had Arcade’s father been in the army with them or something?

Johnson frowned as if he’d said something wrong.  “Er, you should ask Arcade about that.”  He gave me a long stare like he was carefully getting a read on me.  I guess he decided he could trust me, because he relaxed a bit, though he kept his serious expression.  “Look, you’re a good kid.  The others don’t really trust you, not that I blame them.  None of us really trust other people easily and Daisy’s just overprotective.  Arcade trusts you, he’s gotten a lot more attached to you than you might realize.  He doesn’t do that often.  When he hit you with his car, he was more upset than I’ve seen him since his father died.  You mean a lot to him Jack.  Don’t make him regret getting close to you.”

I tilted my head.  Why was he saying this?  Was he afraid I was too immature for Arcade?  Did he know about me and Vulpes?  I nodded, pretending he had absolutely no cause for concern.  I really hoped he couldn’t see through my expression.  

*       *       *

I was almost going to go looking for Jack by the time he finally walked in with Johnson.  I figured he’d gotten lost or they’d gotten talking.  While he’d been getting the last of dinner, Calamity and Moreno had arrived, the latter of whom had, as we all expected, switched on the TV on the wall so he wouldn’t miss any of the football game he was watching.  We knew better than to argue with him and I think we were mostly grateful that he had a distraction.  Besides, it seemed to keep him from arguing with Johnson as much; I guess he was afraid he’d miss part of the game.  

Dinner was pretty good.  The food was great and with Moreno distracted watching the game and occasionally cursing at the television, the rest of us could have a pleasant conversation.  Doc Henry, surprisingly, piped up to explain that Rex’s surgery had been successful and the dog should be ready to go home with us when Jack and I went back to the city.  The doc was usually pretty quiet, so I was even more surprised when this explanation led into a long and incredibly in-depth discussion of canine neuroscience between he and Jack.  Granted, I threw in a few comments here and there, but it was mostly just the two of them.  Johnson and Daisy looked just as surprised; we’d never really seen anyone get Henry going on about his work like that.  I guess Jack had made a good first impression.  Eventually, the Scotsman realized he and the doc were excluding us and helped change the subject.  Henry got much quieter, but I could tell that Jack had actually managed to impress him, which was tough to do.  Somehow Jack seemed to be getting along pretty well with everyone, actually, and I was amazed.  I mean, it was a really good sign, and I hadn’t expected this to be a complete disaster, but this was really going better than I had hoped, nightmares and blizzards notwithstanding.  

Unfortunately, that was about to change.  No one in my make-shift family ate particularly fast, I guess for them it was a luxury they liked to take to eat slowly and for me it was kind of the same.  Jack ate fast, as usual, but with the conversation, I guess he didn’t feel as restless.  He talked and listened, continuing to make an outstanding impression and peppering the conversation with a couple of his wild anecdotes over the five hours of the meal.  Not that we were all constantly eating over that time, it was Thanksgiving, and the way our Thanksgivings usually went had food out from start to finish and most of us only spent maybe and hour actively eating.  Johnson and Moreno were the only ones who really gorged themselves, and they also probably drank twice as much as any of the rest of us.  

Given that rate of consumption, I wasn’t surprised when around ten that night, Johnson, mildly tipsy, launched into the story of his nickname.  Luckily, none of us were eating at the time.  “So they used to call me `Cannibal Johnson.’”

This was his lead-in, fairly out of nowhere because we’d just reached a point where conversation had lulled and this was apparently his way of keeping it going.  Jack stared in confused curiosity.  “Why?”

“Well, it was...it was back in the war,”  I rested my chin in my palm to hide my reflexive frown.  They’d never been in a war, per-say, but I guess he was lying to hide how they really knew each other.  It had been war-like enough, from what they’d told me.  

“I got cut off on my own and had to rest.  I got ambushed in the middle of the night, probably a dozen guys, but I got the jump on the one closest to me.  I took him out with my knife, but my gun was too far too reach.  But I’d given away that I was awake now, so there I was, alone, with a knife, with only the embers of my campfire to see by, surrounded by at least ten guys.”  He paused for dramatic effect and the three of us who’d heard the story and weren’t swearing rabidly at the television nearly sighed.  For the most part, Johnson was a no-nonsense kind of guy, but he did get dramatic about his nickname.  And Jack looked completely rapt.  

“Well, I had to do something, so I did the only thing I could think of— I bent down and took a huge bite out of the guy I’d just killed.”  I think everyone had expected a gasp or grimace or something, but Jack just sort of tilted his head, almost in amusement.  Did he think Johnson was making this up, or was he just too used to graphic violence in his own life to be shocked?  

Johnson, who hid any disappointment he had fairly well, continued, “Well, they all panicked, I think one guy outright threw up, but it gave me the time I needed to get my gun and take care of the rest of them, and it earned me my nickname when I got back to— back to base.”  

Daisy gave Johnson a playful look and queried, “You have to tell that story to everyone, don’t you?”

He laughed, “At least I waited until no one was eating!”  

The conversation ended abruptly as Jack’s phone went off, which was a little surprising in and of itself as most carriers had very spotty reception up here so most of us had just turned our phones off.  His practically hellish German heavy metal ringtone startled even Moreno out of what he was doing (he’d been snarling at the referees, again.)  

At first I thought the caller was Jack’s sister until he frowned curiously at the number for several seconds before standing up and looking at me.  “I think I need to take this.”  He had that hollow look in his eyes again, or maybe it was dread this time, and his voice was eerily quiet.  He answered and walked into the hall and out of sight before I could reply.  “Dairmad?  What is it?”  His accent came all the way back as he answered and even though he spoke more before he was quite out of earshot in the quiet lodge, I couldn’t understand him.  A few hours later, I realized why the tone of his voice and the way he acted had so disturbed me: it was the same disbelieving horror I saw in family members when we told them their relative was terminal or already dead.  

I guess my friends had already realized something was wrong.  They stared at me for a long moment before Daisy changed the subject.  We all seemed to realize that Jack, at the very least, couldn’t explain or talk it out while on the phone.  We distracted ourselves and gave him time.  I figured he’d return once the phone call was over, but that turned out to be wrong.   I didn’t want to dwell on the fact that he was probably upset and I couldn’t help him right now, I just trusted that he’d come to me when he could be helped.  I didn’t find him until much later in the night, and I guess it was my own fault for losing track of time. 


	28. Paradise by the Dashboard Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Promises only count for so much, so guess who's followed Jack to the mountains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the Meatloaf song. It should pretty clearly foretell something that happens in this chapter. >w>

I recognized the number as soon as I saw it and felt like my stomach had dropped out through the floor.  It was Dairmad Black, my mother’s attorney.  Between the thought that she was, for some unknown reason, suing me and the idea that he might have even worse reasons for calling, I felt dread settle heavily into my gut before I even answered.  I already expected that I was going to break down and had to leave the room.  Crying in front of Arcade was one thing, but I really didn’t want to break down in front of his entire family.  I asked Dairmad to give me a moment to get somewhere I could talk and I don’t think Arcade heard me say that.  The lawyer had always been pretty friendly to me, so I wasn’t surprised when he agreed.  He said that he’d been told I was in California and had intentionally called at a time he thought I’d be awake.  He explained as I sought a good place to chat, that he’d called several times before when I had my phone off.  He knew the sort of hours I kept, so I guess he’d just gone on trying different times until I answered.  

I’d hoped to find the room where Arcade and I were staying, but in the dark hallways, I guess I got a bit lost.  I found a snow-covered porch instead back near the kitchen.  I guess it must have been an outdoor part of the restaurant when this had been a lodge.  The view was spectacular and the dark corridors creeped me out, so I leaned on the metal frame of the sliding glass doors, letting the warmth of my breath fog the view of the snowy mountains.  

“Alright, Dairmad, what is it?”

He sounded sympathetic.  “I know things must be pretty hard for you right now, Jack, I’m sorry.  It’s just there is the matter of your mother’s will, now, she named you—”

“What?”  My voice caught in my throat and I felt as if the chill from outside had suddenly gushed into my bones.  There was just no way.  “She’s dead?”

The lawyer paused and I heard the emotion in his voice when he spoke again.  “You...you didn’t know?  ...Oh.  Oh, God, Jack, I-I’m so sorry...”

I felt vacant.  I stared blankly, I don’t know how long, and at some point my knees gave out and I slid down the cold steel frame to slump against the window, still holding my phone.  Dairmad kept talking, but I didn’t hear him.  

My mother was dead.  When she’d kicked me out, I’d resigned myself to never hear from her again, but then she’d called, and we’d made up.  It had been a dream come true at the time, really.  I’d spent weeks trying to convince myself that she was gone and that being true to myself was worth losing every surviving person I knew.  When she’d forgiven me I’d hoped that maybe we could both be kind of close again, maybe I could even visit sometimes.  In a moment of sheer quixotic stupidity, I’d even imagined that maybe someday she’d walk me down the aisle.  Now _that_ had always been ridiculous, it was just a romantic notion I’d always had that was pretty much impossible if I even survived long enough to get married, which, given my luck, wasn’t likely.  I hadn’t really expected that to happen, I guess, but I had thought that maybe a dinner, either at my house in San Francisco or at my family’s estate up in the highlands, where my mother and Arcade might actually meet each other (or my mother and Vulpes, although technically they’d already met and getting him into that situation seemed to be asking for disaster) wouldn’t be entirely out of the question.  

But now it was, all of it.  And I was just numb.  I’d lost too many people, and then when I thought I’d lost my mother, she’d come back.  But she hadn’t, not really, it was just one phone call and she was...gone.  Really gone.  Permanently.  

I wasn’t sure I could deal with that.  

A knock on the window startled me out of my thoughts.  I must have yelped aloud because I heard Dairmad ask what had happened.  Looking up, I realized that I wasn’t alone.  Vulpes Inculta stood outside the sliding glass door, crouched slightly to be close to eye-level with me.  For the frigid weather, he wore a thin black shirt, a red jacket, and distractingly tight jeans.  Only his massive snow boots really fit with the ongoing blizzard and he only seemed to wear them to keep the snow from soaking his pants.  He had the closest I’d seen to a comforting look from him.  

I almost forgot to answer Dairmad.  “Could we talk some other time to sort out the will?  There’s someone here.”  

“Well, that’s the thing, there’s a lot to be sorted out, legally speaking and it would really help if you could come out here to go through it.  I can get up to your family’s estate or meet you in London, but I’m afraid I can’t make it to America for this matter.  If you need money for the ticket to get here, you family have always been good friends, and I could loan you that, but you would have to pay me back—”  

“Money’s no issue.  When do you want me out there?  And my family’s estate...would be better.”  My estate.  Probably.  Or my sister’s.  She would need a guardian.  I’d try to take the job myself, but with my luck, we’d both die horribly.  Or she’d get sold to the Legion.  And Vulpes would subsequently kill everyone responsible.  Actually, more likely, I’d just get everyone close to me killed, again, as usual.  Sometimes I really hate my luck.  

Dairmad gave me a date and I made note of it, ending the discussion and hanging up.  I needed a distraction.  When I got upset, I usually wrote or painted, but I had nothing in mind to write or paint and no means to do either right now, so I went to plan B and C.  I needed exercise.  When my mother had kicked me out I had, partly out of necessity, trekked from Scotland to London on foot.  When Ven had died, I’d spent a day traipsing around the city until my legs were too tired to move.  I also had a bad habit of pacing when I was stressed.  Barring a long walk, or writing or painting, sex and masturbation were my best distractions.  Pretty much the reason I’d cranked out so many erotic novels in my short and bloody life.  

I pocketed my phone and stood.  The sliding door wasn’t locked and I didn’t even consider that there might be a burglar alarm on it before sliding it open.  There was no real sound beyond the scraping of the old, minimally oiled track as the door slid open and as I closed it behind me.  I needed to walk.  Even if I just had my worn-to-hell converse and jeans, I didn’t care, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to Vulpes, who had seemed to think I’d been planning to let him inside when I’d opened the door.  

When I shuffled past him through the snow, he knew otherwise.  There were too many thoughts in my head for conversation right now, and if I spoke, I feared I’d cry.  I just needed to keep moving until I calmed down enough to talk about it.  Vulpes seemed to understand, or else he just accepted my eccentricity in this regard.  He followed me silently, not asking what I was doing or why I was acting so oddly.  He didn’t argue with the fact that I was wandering off into the woods in knee-high snow while more flakes were still falling and the temperature had to be below zero in Celsius.  I didn’t have a coat or even a jacket, just a long-sleeve shirt of fairly thin fabric, but I hardly noticed.  

I must have walked for half an hour with him shadowing me in silence until my legs stopped moving.  Looking down, I saw that I was shaking uncontrollably and couldn’t feel my hands in my pockets or most of my body, for that matter.  My nose was running and I had to open my mouth to breath, letting in a rush of frigid air that made my teeth hurt.  How far had I even walked?

“Are you only bothered by cars when they are in motion?”  Vulpes spoke softly, but the question still came out of nowhere and I would have flinched if I had the capability of moving that quickly right now.  

“Yeah, I think so.  Why?”

“Because I have a car nearby and you are not Siberian.”

I only realized now that I hadn’t been wandering as aimlessly as I’d thought.  In my blind need to walk, I’d wound up following the only path visible in the snow: Vulpes’ own footprints.  I’d tracked beside them down the mountain and now, looking around, I could see the parking lot where Johnson and Moreno had left their Hummers.  I saw it through the trees, but a new vehicle was still obvious, enormous and devoid of the white coat that had settled over all the others.  It was some type of truck, pitch black and gleaming faintly blue in the light reflected off the snow.  I could barely see the lodge any more through the blizzard.  

My teeth started chattering and I slid my hands up to rub my numbed arms before I remembered to nod in reply.  My legs felt almost too stiff to move in the cold and the snow and the fabric of my jeans had been soaked and frozen, making it even more difficult to walk.  I don’t know if it was just that or if I was simply too emotionally shaken to register that I should actually move towards the truck, but I just stood there shivering until I felt him wrap his arm around me and guide me forward.  

He practically had to help me open the door and climb up into the back seat because my arms were too numb to manipulate the door handle.  I didn’t realize that the truck even had two rows of seating until I was inside and wondering where the wheel was.  He closed the door once I was in.  The black leather upholstery wasn’t warm, but neither was it as cold as the blizzard.  He must have only gotten up here recently for the car to have stayed so warm.  My shoulder were even warmer.  Reaching up, I discovered that Vulpes had draped his jacket over me, probably at the same time that he’d started guiding me towards the car.  

I was coming to my senses; I must have been getting hypothermic, because as I warmed up, I could think more clearly.  

Vulpes stopped by the driver’s seat to do something so the truck would warm up before getting in on the other side of the back seat.  Thinking back, I came to suspect that the vehicle had a specialized heating system so it wouldn’t need the engine to stay warm.  

We sat in silence for a while, just warming up.  I guess he just thought he’d let me take my time until I felt like talking.  I don’t think he expected the question I asked.  

“Is this your car?”

After a quizzical glance, he answered quite plainly, “No.  It belongs to a friend who does not use it often.  He prefers...less conspicuous vehicles in his work, and this was more practical for my purposes.”

I tilted my head.  Instinct told me not to pry, but I pushed my luck.  “I thought your work was only in the city.”

“We’re branching out.  As was always the plan.  Atticus, the owner of this vehicle, ranges farther than most.”

“Why are you up here?”

“Do you not want me to visit you or did you expect me to keep my promise to your doctor friend?”

I hesitated.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure, I was just surprised to see him here.  

He shifted into a more comfortable position, sliding off his snowy boots and stretching his legs along the upholstery between us.  “I do not plan to kill him, if you were thinking that— as tempting as he makes that notion.  I came up here to see you, and because I suspected that you might...receive troubling news.”

I followed his lead, taking off my sneakers, although my jeans were too soaked to put on the seat, in my opinion.  I processed that statement.  Last I’d heard, he’d been with my sister.  Maybe she’d heard what had happened to our mother and he’d gone up here to comfort me.  “You heard about my mother, then?”

“Yes.”  He paused to retrieve a towel from a cubby in the front seat armrest, which he left open displaying other neatly folded towels.  

“Your friend keeps towels in his car?”

“Towels are incredibly useful.  Perhaps especially so in his case.  Your clothes are still wet.”

My voice caught in my throat.  Was he really steering things in that direction after the news I’d just gotten?  “A-are you asking me to strip?”

He dried some melting snow out of his short hair.  “We do not need to do anything if you don’t wish to.”

I paused, eying the towels and he added, “You’ve been much calmer than I expected, given the fact that we are still in a car and you aren’t exhausted or drugged as far as I know.”

“The car isn’t moving.”

“Even so.”  He moved somewhat closer to me and I realized that he was undressing.  His clothes weren’t as soaked as mine, but they were fairly wet, and as much as I suspected he had other reasons, he did need to move towards the middle of the truck to take off his pants without setting them on his snow-covered boots in the footwell or bending very far forward.  Once he had his shirt off, I could see the bandage still on his side.  It had presumably been changed since I’d last seen it, but the wound bulged and he seemed to favor that side.  Was it infected...?  

“You know...”  I trailed off awkwardly.  He looked up, now in his boxers.  Okay, seeing him like that, even in the dim light inside the car, confirmed my decision.  “You know, I could use a distraction...so long as your friend who owns the car would be alright with it...”

“What Atticus doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

*       *       *

Besides, my associate had more than likely done the same in this car on many occasions, probably most of which were less clean or consensual than this.  Although, as far as I knew, he was also not interested in men, so technically this was a slightly different activity.  

Jack was clearly upset, unsurprisingly after the news he had received, and he needed a distraction.  I was happy to oblige.  That said, if he hadn’t been interested, given the news he had just received, I wouldn’t have forced him.  As tempting as the idea might be, I found that I genuinely cared what he felt; I wasn’t going to rape him when he so clearly needed comfort.  Not that I was the best at comforting.  I hoped, given Jack’s own quirks, I could still help him sufficiently in my own ways.  

Besides, right now I didn’t look forward to sex quite as much as I might have under normal circumstances; the gunshot wound hadn’t healed properly.  As much as I’d been trying to keep it clean, the sutures had torn slightly and it seemed to have festered.  Right now, it wasn’t particularly bad.  If it got worse, I planned to force the doctor, Arcade, to heal me, but for now it seemed only a mild annoyance.  Although, admittedly, I knew very little about medicine, I realized that there was a risk of infection, so I had been using small doses of antibiotics which I presumed would treat it well enough.  The wound was painful, and the pain served to remind me to remain wary of Lanius and those working for him.  At the time, I had failed to notice the fever.  

*       *       *

Whatever my momentary concern about his wound, his actions completely assuaged the worries I had.  Vulpes kissed me.  It was still a chaste kiss, of course, but it was passionate, and he immediately followed it up by reaching down to unzip my jeans.  The wet denim had shrunk and clung to my legs, leaving the skin cold and damp once he got my pants off.  Even at this point, I wasn’t hard yet, for once.  I guess I was too distracted by other, less pleasant emotions.  To his credit, he didn’t say anything about it and I tried to help myself along, in that regard.  I didn’t expect him to help me along, considering who this was and the fact that I still wasn’t sure that this was more than personal pleasure for him (that is, I still wasn’t sure if this was just sex or not for Vulpes.)  Although he had warned me on several occasions...and it seemed like he was really going out of his way to watch out for me.  Was that just because he liked having sex with me, because we’d known each other as kids, or...was there another reason?  

I hadn’t expected to suddenly find his hand joining mine in stroking my cock.  Somehow feeling his fingers brush against mine was just as electric as feeling them wrap around my shaft.  The sensation alone was getting me hard, but I kept trying to speed it along with my thoughts.  This whole idea of what we were about to do was pretty hot in and of itself.  I’d been a pervy ten-year-old, not that I wasn’t even more sex-driven now, and growing up on Grease, Back to the Future, and a dozen other movies that involved at least the mention of car sex, it had been my most frequent fantasy before the accident that killed my father.  After that, it was the fear of cars, driving to and from, and PTSD that kept it firmly off the table for me.  But this car wasn’t moving, we didn’t need to drive here or back, and as long as I didn’t dwell on it, I could distance myself enough that this truck didn’t bother me.  

He jolted me from my thoughts by thrusting into me.  The angle was so good that it took me a while to notice that he was going more slowly than usual.  Then again, we were in the backseat of a truck, even a large one, and the reality fell somewhat short of the fantasy.  As much as the angle of the sex felt amazing, that was the only part of it.  His thrusts hit all the right places inside me and gave him a great angle to keep stroking my cock while I did the same, but the position also left my back awkwardly twisted, my neck pushed painfully forward against the armrest of the door, which grated my vertebrae with each thrust and ground against the back of my skull.  One of my shoulders hung over the edge of the seat to I had to hold my arm up so my elbow wouldn’t get soaked on my shoes.  I was off balance like that and half afraid that I’d fall right off the seat, but I had to resist my instinct to close my thighs around him to help steady myself.  Given the angle, if I did that, my legs would squeeze the wound on his side, and I didn’t want to hurt him.  

Whatever the discomfort, I needed the pain right now.  I wanted it.  His massive cock jammed painfully inside me hurt almost as much as the pressure on my back, and I loved every second of it.  I’m not sure that would have changed even if we hadn’t been having sex.  I really needed the tactile distraction from everything going on in my mind right now.  

After a while, I nearly fell off the seat thanks to my lack of balance.  He caught me.  Again it surprised me how incredibly strong he was.  I felt like he was holding most of my weight with one hand, even if he was probably just stabilizing me against the seat.  

“You _can_ hold on, you know, and I would recommend that you do so.”  

“Uh, how?” I hesitated, “I don’t really see a good way of doing that.”

“Your legs.  I believe you are quite skilled at that?”

Was he referencing the fact that I rode horses?  How did he know?  Right, this was Vulpes.  “Won’t that hurt you?  Your gunshot w—”

In reply, he grabbed my knees and pressed my thighs against his abdomen in a way that let him resume thrusting, which he did as soon as he had me positioned.  

“A-alright...”  I trusted that he knew what he was doing, but...that bandage did not look right.  It was hard to tell in the dark of the truck, but I thought I saw a stain on the cotton pad.  It shouldn’t still be bleeding after over a month...  

But I believed that he knew what he was doing, so I let it be.  Maybe he just liked pain as well?  I squeezed just enough to hold myself steady and felt his reaction.  He grimaced for a split second, an involuntary reaction before he hid it behind a more-intense-than-usual cold stare.  I felt his whole body tense and he came, and that pushed me over the edge, both literally and metaphorically.  

A few seconds later, I lay awkwardly sprawled in the relatively dry section of the footwell between our snow-covered shoes, my back painfully curled forward, semen on my belly, and my head wedged between the front seat armrest and the back of the passenger’s side seat.  Vulpes caught his breath, leaning against the upholstery.  

“You seem to like pain almost as much as I do.”

He took longer than I expected to answer; it made me wonder if his wound hurt more than it should.  I was starting to worry.  But this was Vulpes, he knew what he was doing, right?

“Pain has its uses.”  He hesitated for a moment and helped me back onto the seat, although I didn’t need much help now that I wasn’t numb from cold.  And having sex had certainly warmed up both us and the car.  Vulpes continued, “Although, I admit that was more painful than I had expected.”

I started to ask if he was alright, but changed tack at the look he gave me.  “...What is this exactly?”

His warning stare softened to a frown of confusion.  “What is what?”

“This.”  I gestured vaguely, “Us.  Is this just sex?  Or...”

He hesitated.  It took me a while to suspect that he wasn’t certain.  “It is more than sex.”

“...but you don’t know how much more.”

He looked away, initially just avoiding my gaze, but then staring out the window at something.  At the lodge, I realized, following his gaze.  The few visible lights had gone dark.  The power had gone out.  I also noticed that the snow had stopped falling.  

“There is ice on most of the trees and wires,” Vulpes explained, “it probably damaged their power supply.  I have already checked the residence; the heating is self-contained, the lodge is still perfectly safe.”  

“Still dark.”

“Does the dark bother you?”

“I...I’m not _fond_ of it, no.”

He nodded pointedly at the minimal light in the truck.  

I snorted.  “This is one thing.  I’m not fond of pitch black, indoors, in a large and unfamiliar building.”

“You prefer a dark car to a dark building?”

“A _stationary_ car.  And there is less room to hide in a car than a building.”

He nodded and I wondered vaguely if he had suggested sex specifically because of my fear of cars.  This was Vulpes, he seemed to plan everything.  Expect this relationship, it seemed.  

He didn’t even know how he felt.  That wasn’t helpful.  I didn’t need more uncertainty right now, even if I could hardly hold it against him.  I still wasn’t sure which of them I would choose, if I had to make that choice.  

I hauled myself onto the seat beside him and sighed, mulling over everything I had to think about.  

*       *       *

Jack sat very still.  He seemed much more relaxed now, but still distressed, not that I expected sex to completely alleviate his concerns.  His posture, legs stretched leisurely along the seat, one hand helping to stabilize him and the other draped over his thighs, suggested absolute ease, but he stared blankly at the armrest, clearly not seeing it.  He’d taken the bandage off his chest as the wounds had scabbed completely.  His other cuts had healed, some of the deepest still showing as pale scars on his smooth skin, but those deep scratches remained clearly visible as raised red lines of black sutures and dried blood along his breastbone.  

Staring at it reminded me of the fact that Lanius had sent men after both myself and Jack.  The bombing of the newspaper tower had been his doing, as I’d discovered in the past several weeks.  That said, the evidence I had was purely testimony from his own men, men who feared Lanius more than myself unless I had them completely isolated and thus at my mercy.  I could hardly take them before Caesar to confess, and outing Lanius’ actions so openly was unlikely to end well for the Legion.  He had his uses, but his horrifically misguided `morality’ was a problem.  For some reason he saw my relationship with Jack as unacceptable, and thus he’d decided to actually focus some attention on me.  He wouldn’t act openly, or if he did, I didn’t expect to come out on top, as it were.  Something had to be done to resolve this situation.  That was part of why, now more than usual, I was doing everything I could to make myself and the frumentari in general invaluable to the Legion.  Some of those actions had been...regrettable.  And I did not regret much.  

*       *       *

I frowned.  

Vulpes, apparently, was not as lost in his thoughts as I had presumed.  “Are you alright?”

“Vulpes, I found out about an hour ago that my mother is dead.”  I glanced out the window again, seeing that the lights were still out at the lodge, and added, “I’m as alright as I can be, I guess, under the circumstances.”

He remained silent, watching me.  I couldn’t drop the subject right now, I needed to talk about it, but I fell silent, not really sure what to say and in the lapse I guess he felt that he should say something.  “I do not recall my mother.”

I looked back over at him.  “Sorry.”  He seemed unsure what to say, I guess this was taking him way out of his comfort zone.  In his pause, I added, finding direction to my maelstrom of thoughts, “I just meant...I mean, I’m not even sure how she died.  I haven’t talked to her since she called me in the hospital.”

“Alerio mentioned that.”  I eyed him quizzically.  “My men respect your privacy only when I do.”  Which was probably close to never, though I was surprisingly alright with that.  “I was simply trying to...respond in kind.  I am not sure what else to say in this situation.”  

We both fell silent for several more minutes, sitting in the warm car with our wet clothes drying on the seats around us.  

“It was a plane crash.”

I flinched.  “What?”

“Your mother.  A bomb was planted on her private jet while she was departing Korea.”

I studied the scars on my hands, feeling myself tearing up again.  “It was in the news, wasn’t it?”  And I missed it because I don’t watch the news.  Stupid me.  As usual.  

“Yes.”  He stared at me, an odd intensity to his eyes that I couldn’t place.  “But they did not mention that a more direct assassination attempt was foiled shortly before she boarded her flight.”  

Now I stared back.  “...are you saying that you saved my mother’s life just before she was murdered...?”  Or was he saying that he had been the thwarted assassin?

I shouldn’t have expected an answer.  “I was there when she boarded her jet.  She called you shortly after.”

Now I was completely speechless.  Had he killed my mother, saved her life, or just convinced her to reconcile with me, possibly through the course of doing one of the former two options?  His blank stare remained an enigma.  

“Since we last discussed the subject, I am sure you have learned more of the organization known as the Legion?”

The statement caught me off-guard and I blurted out, “Why?  Y...You’re one of the Legion’s executives, aren’t you?”

“`Executive’?  I am not a businessman.  I hold significant rank, yes.  I do not command it, but I am perhaps the fourth most powerful man involved in the organization.  What is your opinion of the Legion, Jack?”

Why was he asking?  Did he want me to join?  Did he want my support on a more extreme venture?  He hadn’t seemed to care what I thought of it before.  

I shrugged.  “As long as I’m not in a cage, I have no problem with them.”

“You are aware that the Legion is responsible for a great number of deaths, bombings, and assassinations worldwide?”

“Do _you_ object to that?  You still seem pretty loyal to the Legion...”

“I am.  Completely.  Do you find such actions objectionable?”

“I...”  My voice caught in my throat.  If Arcade could hear me now...  “I have never been the most moral man.  I have no objection to the Legion; it’s action serve a goal, don’t they?  As long as I remain free, I have no objection to the way the world has always been.”

He seemed to hesitate, which surprised me.  “You have loyalty, though?”

I grinned at the memory.  “Didn’t we have this talk earlier?”

“Has that answer changed?”

I didn’t need to consider my response.  “Yes.  I am loyal to you, Arcade, and to my sister and clan, or rather those of my clan who did not betray me.”

“Which excludes all but your sister and uncle?”  I nodded.  “And you are loyal to both myself and the doctor.  How?”  

“Carefully.”

He grinned very subtly.  “Aiding the Legion out of loyalty to myself would not be a betrayal of everything the doctor believes about you?”

“That depends on how I aid the Legion.”

“It does?”

Now I didn’t answer.  I guess he’d been rubbing off on me.  

“That is a fine line to walk, Jack.”

“Believe me, if it comes to betrayal, I don’t know which side I will take, and the choice will be the most difficult that I’ve ever made.  I will do anything to avoid that decision without betraying either of you.”

From the way he eyed me I knew that he realized how very dangerous a path I was choosing to walk.  Dangerous for both of us.  Or, given the dream I kept having, even more dangerous for Arcade.  


	29. Cold as Ice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, Jack has a flashback towards the end of this and it gets VERY dark. Seriously, you already know a lot of this is fairly dark stuff, but this flashback seemed bad enough to warrant a warning, so just...be warned. I may be misjudging it, or maybe I visualize it worse than I convey through my writing, but it just seems really disturbing, so be warned.  
> Also, chapter title from the song by Foreigner.

A while after Jack left, the game that had Moreno so engrossed was interrupted by a news broadcast about a major bombing in Seattle.  Over Moreno’s cursing at the interruption, the rest of us listened to the details.  Johnson sighed gravely.  “What is the world coming to?  After everything going on in San Francisco, now this?”

We all caught the implied connection.  ...it _was_ possible.  But if the chaos back home was connected to this, then it was much more serious than I’d thought, not that I knew a huge amount about it.  And the bombings and such in San Francisco seemed to be the work of the Legion.  If they were also instigating things in Seattle...  

Daisy frowned.  “All this seems a bit more...organized than random attacks.  Might be something more serious going on.”

Judah frowned, “Yes, it does look that way...”

I thought I recognized that tone.  “Are you thinking of actively trying to stop whoever’s doing this?”

Johnson had the same almost hopeful look that I probably did and Judah frowned at both of us.  “I understand that this is costing lives, but we still need to lay low.  Besides, the government must be working to stop this themselves, and without the resources we had in the old days...I don’t think there’s much we could do if we tried.  This operation— whoever’s behind it— clearly has resources we can’t compete with.”

Johnson considered and then nodded somewhat grudgingly.  They could probably get the resources for a tactical strike, but none of us really knew who was behind it all or where that person was and I only had a suspicion about the former, not the latter.  Judah was right.  Even if it was frustrating that I couldn’t do anything beyond my work as a doctor to stop everything that was happening.  Although, then again, maybe I could try to look into it when I had time.  I might be able to figure out who was orchestrating all the bombings and such.  It was terrorism, really, which was part of why I suspected the Legion.  But the Legion’s leader, this mysterious Caesar was so underground that he could easily be on the other side of the planet, in which case I would had absolutely no chance of tracking him down.  But if he wasn’t, and if I was really lucky, maybe I might actually manage to find him...  

The idea was kind of a pipe-dream.  I was unlikely to actually succeed if I tried it, so I’d probably only actively seek out the Legion if something worse happened.  I hated to think it, but that would have to be something personal.  Like if something threatened Jack.  

Moreno, of course made some remark about how this wouldn’t be tolerated if the government still operated the way it used to, to which Johnson pretty much voiced my own thoughts on the subject and the two of them started yet another argument.  Daisy, Judah, Henry, and I all sighed in unison.  The shouting match was cut short as the room suddenly went dark.  Everyone tensed instinctively, falling silent, listening because we all half expected to be ambushed at any second.  I had a few vague memories from my early childhood of having the power cut right before my mother rushed me out of there.  The others probably had much more vivid images evoked.  Judah, Johnson, Moreno, Daisy, and myself all reached for our weapons instinctively.  Despite where I usually kept my holster, being out here in the mountains with my make-shift family, I had my father’s pistol in the inner pocket of my jacket, and I had my hand nervously on the grip in a fraction of a second.  Judah did the same, grabbing the nearly identical deagle in the inner pocket of his own jacket.  Johnson had his bowie knife drawn in the same amount of time, Moreno drew his own knife and gripped his own gun, while Daisy partially withdrew her pistol from a pocket I hadn’t even noticed in the inside of her winter jacket.  We all froze to listen.  

Henry sighed, waving a hand dismissively.  “The power line is probably down, again.  Most blizzards here come with freezing rain, which downs trees or just snaps the line on its own.  I’ll go start the primary back-up generator.”  He got up and Calamity followed him, taking out her phone to use as a flashlight.  The rest of us took a moment to calm down.  Judging from the wary glances and the way nobody actually made a sound, I got the sense that I wasn’t the only one who felt reluctant to let my guard down so quickly when we weren’t absolutely certain that this was just the weather.  

Not that we didn’t trust Henry, and he was rarely wrong, but experience had taught us all to err on the side of caution.  It must have been fifteen minutes before Johnson put his knife away.  “If they haven’t come for us at this point, its just the storm.”

“Agreed.” Judah yawned and checked his own phone.  “Well, it’s late.  I’m going to turn in for the night.”  

The rest of us shared his sentiment, considering the lights were out anyway so we might as well go to sleep, besides, I’d been tired enough to go to bed for the past several hours.  We bid each other good night, most of us still keeping one hand on our weapons, and I went off to look for Jack.  

I only realized now that he’d been gone for several hours.  Had he gotten lost?  Or broken down?  Was he alright?  He’d probably gotten lost, I figured, considering the sprawling resort and the fact that the lights were now out.  And this was Jack, who seemed to make a habit of wandering around places.  Using my phone as a flashlight, I searched most of the first floor before realizing that he might have just gone back to the room we were sharing.  If he had gotten upset, he seemed pretty self-conscious about his emotions.  Unsurprisingly, really, societal expectations of masculinity being what they are, and with him seeming fairly insecure about a lot of things.  Maybe he had found his way there after all, at the very least I should rule it out before I searched the whole house for him.  

I headed up there, but didn’t get to the room uneventfully.  On one of the resort’s many large staircases, I realized I wasn’t alone.  Someone was standing at the top of the stairs, leaning on the banister and looking down at me.  In the dark, he was out of the range of my pathetically ineffective phone light, so I only really got that he didn’t seem old and none of my friends would be wandering around without lights.  They all had phones or keychain flashlights, and this man was lurking completely in the dark, standing perfectly still.  

“...Jack?”  I already knew it wasn’t Jack, although I’m not sure how I knew.  Something about him just unsettled me.  

That horribly familiar gravely voice replied very simply.  “No.  I believe he returned to the room you two are sharing.”

That fucking journalist!  I scowled.  “I heard about a bombing in Seattle,was that your doing?  It seemed like the sort of thing you’d do if you had the amount of explosives we found in Jack’s basement.”  That was his stuff, I was confident enough in that belief to openly mention it.  But I only brought up the Seattle bombing in the hope of taunting him; I really never thought he might actually be responsible.  

“I am glad you appreciate my work.  I thought you might appreciate the fact that there is now significantly less C4 in Jack’s basement.”  For a second I thought he was joking.  Then I realized that he was being sincere, if a bit sarcastic.  I redoubled that sentiment.  

“Thanks, I _so_ love getting rid of explosives at the cost of innocent lives.”  I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or amused and I didn’t care.  “Why are you here?  Haven’t you ruined Jack’s life enough already?”  

He had started to leave, but froze at the second part of my statement.  I guess I struck a nerve.  He turned back very slowly and even though I could only see him as a vague silhouette, I could _feel_ him glaring at me.  “How _exactly_ have I ruined his life?”

The hate practically dripped from his words.  I had my hand on my gun and would have drawn it if I could see him clearly enough to know he wasn’t already pointing a gun at me.  If I knew he wasn’t armed, I would probably have shot him already.  Would this man ever stop making me regret having healed him?  

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe when you raped him, for starters?”

He stayed very silent.  I guess he had no response to that.  “Who are you anyway?  I know you aren’t really a journalist, or at least that’s not all you are.  Why are you even here?”  I wasn’t really that surprised to see him here.  Of course he had lied about leaving us alone, he knew where we were, so he was also here.  Of course.  

For a moment, he stayed silent, not even moving, and I fully expected him to ignore both questions, but to my surprise he answered.  “My name is Vulpes Inculta, leader of the frumentarii.”  I had heard the name mentioned in news articles on the Legion, and I knew enough about Roman history to recognize the term “frumentarii.”  He was with the Legion, as I had suspected, but he held a lot more power with them than I had thought.  I knew he was dangerous, very dangerous, but I’d thought this was some mid-level agent who had some sick obsession with Jack and got his buddies to tail him; instead, it was now obvious that this guy was a whole lot worse than that.  What had Jack gotten himself into now?  And I didn’t think it was his fault at all; at the time, I fully attributed this mess with the Legion to Jack’s crazy and terrible luck.  

I had half a mind to just shoot the guy right now and hope for the best, and that thought didn’t exactly dissipate as he slunk towards me.  I still couldn’t tell if he had his own gun or not.  

“I told you that I would leave you alone only so long as nothing happened.  Something did happen.”

“Something like you cutting the power?”  If he kept walking towards me like that... well, I wasn’t about to try backing down the old staircase in the dark.  

He shook his head, resting a hand on the banister suddenly.  He looked like he might be dizzy.  He wasn’t armed, I realized, and I also noticed that he seemed to be favoring his side, the same side where he’d been shot.  Maybe I hadn’t healed him after all.  

“I never cut the power.  That was the storm.  But you are not in any danger.  Something else changed.  You should check on Jack.”

On one hand, I felt certain that he was just trying to distract me so he could get out of here without another bullet wound, but on the other I felt a twinge of very real dread that he might have done something more to Jack.  The last time he’d raped Jack, the guy had needed hospital treatment, and this was Jack, who tried to shrug off concussions and broken bones.  I gave the hallway towards the room an involuntary glance.  It looked completely dark.  

In the split second during which I looked away from him, Vulpes closed the gap between us.  I had my hand on my gun but hadn’t drawn it and he caught it, just holding the gun in place.  So much for him being vulnerable.  With my pistol immobilized, he drew his own gun, another Desert Eagle, much newer and slightly smaller.  

“Go check on Jack.  We don’t need a shootout here and at this range if either of us shoots, neither will fare well.”

He had a point.  And a gun pointed at me point blank while I still hadn’t been able to draw my own weapon.  I backed up carefully, edging around him up the stairs.  In his own sick way, he seemed to care what happened to Jack and as much as I thought this was just a distraction, if he was really so urgent that I check on Jack, maybe he had done something.  Now I really expected to find Jack passed out and bleeding.  

With the power out, the hallway was pitch black and in the room the only light filtered through a gap in the heavy curtains.  The bedroom was empty, but I heard the shower running and the bathroom door was closed.  

“Jack?”  

No answer but the running water.  If I hadn’t just been warned so insistently to check on him, I would have given him more time, or maybe just presumed that he couldn’t hear me over the shower, but now I was worried.  

“Jack, are you alright in there?”

Still no answer.  I didn’t even hear him moving around, the water sounded absolutely constant.  Was he even conscious?  Was he even _alive_?

“Jack, I’m coming in, if you don’t want me to...well, say something.”  I couldn’t hide the frantic note to my voice as much as I tried.  

Luckily, he hadn’t locked the door; the handle turned easily when I tried it.  He had his phone on the counter to shed some light, but it mostly illuminated the ceiling.  Using my own phone light, it took me a second to find him.  

Jack sat huddled in the corner, half out of the shower.  The water was pouring down on him and it looked like he’d fallen, knocking the curtain aside in the process which soaked half the bathroom.  Jack didn’t seem to notice.  At first I thought he’d slipped and knocked himself out.  Then I realized that he wasn’t completely still, he was quivering; his whole body was tense again, the same way he’d been in the car crash.  Something had set him off.  Turning off the water, I realized what it probably was.  There was no steam.  With the power out, the water heater probably wasn’t working either, and the water was probably freezing.  Jack had said he was afraid of cold water.  Cold water must have triggered his PTSD.  At the time, I figured it was because he had fallen in the ocean in the crash that had killed his father.  I didn’t know there was another reason as well.  

*       *       *

When the freezing water hit my back all the horrible memories flooded my mind, completely blotting out the real world.  

It was the moments I could never forget, the agonizing seconds so painful that they’d burned into my mind like a brand into my skin, carving a record of every detail so that I could never forget.  

The accident that killed my father was so vivid that even after so many years, I still couldn’t separate it from reality until the flashback was over.  I saw the sunset over the ocean.  Then the bus.  The car jerked to the side and my seatbelt snapped my collarbone well before I realized what was happening.  We were in the sea on the slick black rocks, my father’s blood mixing with the frigid waves as they flooded the car now mangled around me.  The screams and moans of the tourists slowly dying in the bus, blackened, twisted metal melded to the ruined frame of the Porsche.  The water darkened, turning red as the screams gradually fell silent.  I felt the icy water numbing me, cold seeping into my very bones.  My mind had stayed numb much longer than my body.  

The cold water changed, one horrible memory segueing into another.  It was no longer the sea, but the Thames, in winter, and I was sinking, only fighting the downward pull out of instinct.  I think.  I can’t tell if I really wanted to kill myself by jumping in or if I was just confused and desperate.  

I hadn’t grown my hair as long back then because my mother refused to let me, but it was still long enough to cover my eyes and catch in my gasping mouth.  The first time I saw Ven, I could hardly be certain he was human.  I just glimpsed a dark figure dive off the bridge after me and haul me to a platform where I guess official people sometimes inspected the bridge or picked things out of the river.  I only heard what he did after the fact, in the memory and the flashback, I only saw him jump before I blacked out, but I knew he had saved my life.  

I had awakened to Ven’s face above me, after he’d performed CPR to restart my heart, a cruelly ironic mirror of the last time we locked eyes.  

Of course, from the cold of the water, the flashback flew to the last and most painful memory I had of Ven.  There was a regular haunt of his when he wasn’t in class or partying.  He went there in his darker moods, especially at night.  For a long time, I didn’t know what he did there, and after I found out, I tried my hardest to forget, or at least pretend I didn’t know.  

I’d found him in one shadowy corner, slumped among the frigid stones and sculpted figures: angels, saints, and immortalized dead.  He was smart, and good at hiding, and I guess no one ever caught him sneaking in, but I wished they had.  

This death had no blood.  There was violence.  There was no screaming, at least not from him.  

He was still alive when I found him.  His limbs hung limply, long legs stretched into the empty aisle, arms paler than I’d ever seen them, one stretched out, palm up, the other flopped across his stomach.  He’d taken his jacket off and it lay draped over the face of an angel statue behind him.  His belt was wrapped around his arm.  He still had one of the needles in his hand.  

I almost knelt on another one as I rushed to check on him.  He was cold, his lips tinted blue and his breathing shallow, but his eyes, fiercely alive and intense, locked on me, gleaming bright gold even in the dim light.  

I was frantic, my own heart beating too quickly for me to count to check his own pulse.  I knew he’d meant to do this immediately, I’d seen him shoot up before, knowing I couldn’t talk him out of it.  He was careful.  He never took too much at once.  This time I saw five empty needles in a glance, and he had a bottle next to him.  I stumbled over every word, my accent back in force with my fear so much so that I’m amazed he understood a single syllable I stammered out.  “We can get help, Ven.  We can do something, get you to the hospital, put you through rehab—”

Ven was perfectly calm.  He was always calm.  Except when he was angry.  I just wasn’t worth his hate.  “`We’?  No, there never _was_ a `we’, Jack.  You’re cute, and pathetic, and honestly I was just hoping you’d drag me down.”

I remember the way my gut felt like I’d swallowed an ocean of freezing water.  He was completely serious.  I thought I took an hour to reply, but it was probably just a few seconds.  I almost couldn’t form the words.  “...`drag you down’?”

“Yeah.”  He laughed, almost coughing, too weak to really make much sound.  I had to strain to hear him at this point.  “You idiot, you really thought this was about you?  This was never about you.  You were always so pathetic and depressing; I only saved you because I thought you could make this easier, don’t you get it?  I hoped being with you would really give me the balls to do this sooner.  Fuck you, Jack.  Fuck the world.”  He started to laugh again and his voice caught in his throat.  That was the last sound he made.  

I didn’t have my phone on me and that night I really regretted it.  His heart stopped.  His breathing might have stopped as well, I’m just know that I didn’t fully realize that it had for fifteen minutes.  I stared numbly at his cold stare for a few seconds until I noticed that my fingers on his neck no longer felt a pulse.  I started CPR, doing the best I really could.  I had been trained, but that was years before he’d OD’ed and I’d never had to use the skill.  I tasted vodka on his lips when I tried blowing air into his mouth.  There were a few times I paused to yell for help, nearly passing out myself for panic and lack of oxygen.  No one came.  I stopped CPR when I got so dizzy I collapsed, spilling his bottle and smacking my shoulder on the frigid stone.  I realized he was dead while I struggled to catch my breath.  

That was where the flashback ended.  I can’t remember if I had passed out after Ven died, fell asleep, or just lay there in some sort of catatonic state of shock until morning had come and a very startled priest had found us both.  I think he’d initially thought that I was dead as well, and I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do anything to change that assumption.  I was honestly surprised that I’d recovered as much as I had.  At the time, I’d really never thought I’d even be able to let myself get close to anyone again.  

*       *       *

For nearly a minute I thought something might be seriously wrong with Jack, beyond the psychological issues I already knew he had.  He stayed completely unresponsive, just shaking and murmuring under his breath.  His accent was too strong for me to understand anything he was saying.  Somewhere else in the repurposed resort Henry got the backup generator running and the lights came on before Jack’s flash-back had finished.  I was already so tense that the bright light made me flinch.  

Jack snapped out of it while I was distracted.  

“Arcade?”

I’m pretty sure my relief was obvious.  “Are you alright?  It was just the cold water, wasn’t it?”

He frowned and nodded.  “Yeah.  What else would it be?”

I don’t know, maybe a rapist frumentari who apparently followed you out here?  “Um...Nothing, I guess, I was just...just checking.”

Jack’s teeth started to chatter and he got up to dry off and dress.  I guess he’d given up on a shower for the night.  Soaked and sitting on the stone tile floor in a room that was already a bit cold, he must have been freezing.  I gave him time to do that, getting ready for bed in the meantime.  He seemed alright for now, though I wanted to talk to him to be sure, and I fully expected that conversation to end with him breaking down at which point, considering how late it was and how little sleep we’d both gotten, we’d probably fall asleep.  It was better that we were both actually in pajamas and in the bed by that point.  

I’d been so shaken up by finding Jack like this after Vulpes had warned me to check on him that I’d completely forgotten about the phone call that had originally brought him away from the dining room.  By the time he was dry and dressed in his green and black plaid pajamas, Jack had the content facade he usually got after being upset about something when he refused to let himself show it.  He was definitely not alright, and I tried to hide how much that bothered me in the hope that doing so would help him.  Maybe I should just let him wait until he was ready to talk about that phone call?  Even just seeing him when he answered it, it really seemed to have shaken him.  Asking him about it right now might just make matters worse.  I decided to give him time and tried to change the subject as he got into bed beside me.  

“Are your pajamas the same plaid as your kilt?”  This was the first time I’d really noticed.  I guess he’d brought the pajamas because they were wool and thus significantly warmer than the various shorts he usually wore to bed.  I think he’d worn these pajamas once before since we’d started sharing a bed, but hadn’t noticed that they matched his kilt until now.  The specific look of the plaid was a little unusual, and he was Scottish, so I felt like it might be significant.  

Jack nodded.  “It’s my family’s tartan.”  He paused like he was done talking, seemed like he wanted to add something, and then decided against it.  He was still cold, so cold that I flinched when his foot brushed against me.  Jeez, had he showered in ice?  

Jack snuggled so far into the bed that the thick blankets covered half his face.  He lay very still, staring either at a small tear in the seam of the quilt covering his nose or at the dusty and rustic log cabin painting on the wall.  I supposed that he must be lost in thought.  I could feel him shivering.  

Partly because I was kind of warm now that I was under the blankets and partly because he just looked so pathetic and cold, I pulled him into a hug, hoping to warm him up as much as comfort him.  He was still freezing.  

I frowned at him, realizing how incredibly cold he actually felt.  “Jack, your skin’s like ice.  Seriously, are you alright?”

He answered a little slowly, as if he’d been falling asleep, but his eyes were open.  I wondered if it was possible that he might be hypothermic.  It was fairly cold, although I don’t think the loss of power had effected the heating system or anything.  But we were in one of the outermost rooms of the old resort and with the blizzard outside, it could get pretty frigid.  And he’d been doused in water that might feasibly have reached freezing temperatures.  

Jack shrugged.  “The water was really cold, and I’m not sure how long I was in there.  And...well...I took a walk.  There was...well, something happened and I really just needed time to process it, I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”

I stared at him.  “...you mean you took a walk _outside_?”

He nodded.  

“...Jack.  Jack, it’s got to be fifteen degrees out there in the snow.  Did you even take your coat?”

He shook his head.  

I sighed, torn between aggravation and concern.  “Jack, what the hell were you thinking?”  I shifted one hand slightly to find his wrist and check his pulse.  He definitely had hypothermia because I already knew that his heartbeat wasn’t normally this irregular.  

He twisted his wrist from my grip and snuggled against me suddenly enough that I got worried.  Hypothermic people could stop their hearts if they moved too suddenly.  I didn’t realize until much later that the motion he used to free his wrist was a classic martial arts hold break, and he used it instinctively.  

“I’m sorry, it’s just...it’s been a rough night.  I’m sorry I just left dinner and didn’t come back, I am really glad that you brought me up here.”  He paused.  He might have been on the verge of tears or else he was just breathing oddly because his body temperature was so low.  

I sighed again.  Something else must have happened.  If there was a god, he clearly had it in for Jack.  Hadn’t the poor guy been through enough already?  

“Jack, it’s alright, I understand.”  I almost asked him what had happened, but decided to give him at least a day.  Hopefully he’d want to talk about it soon anyway as that seemed to help him.  I hugged him closer, resting my chin gently against his head, partly in an attempt to keep him a little warmer.  I slid one hand up to his neck so I could keep track of his pulse while still hugging him.  

He was definitely fighting tears, I could tell now because he choked them back audibly before blurting out, “Arcade...Arcade, could you come with me to Scotland?”

I’d been about as calm as I could be, considering that he was hypothermic and more traumatized than he had been a few hours ago, but at that my eyes snapped wide and I was fully awake again.  “Um...what?”

He repeated the question.  I hesitated and he explained hastily, “I mean, I know you have work and everything, but there’s some legal stuff I really need to sort out, and I don’t plan to go there all that often, and I need to make sure Mila gets home alright anyway, and—”

“You _are_ thinking clearly, Jack?  You’re sure?”

He nodded.  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you’re hypothermic and probably under enough stress to make anyone have a mental breakdown?”

He seemed to frown.  My chin was still resting on the top of his skull, so I couldn’t actually be sure.  “Oh.  Yeah, I guess I am.  But I’m serious, I really need to go to Scotland for a few days and I’d like you to come with me.  I’ll pay for the tickets and everything, money’s no issue, of course, as long as you can take the time off and everything...”

Okay, the whole thousand-some-dollars-for-a-plane-ticket thing had been a major hurdle, but beyond that I wasn’t sure if he could even get me out of the country.  I mean, I could check my gun or maybe leave it behind, but it wasn’t as if I had a passport or even a real driver’s license.  My family’s issues with the government kind of necessitated that most of my documents were just expert forgeries.  But I was also talking to my very emotionally fragile, hypothermic boyfriend who’d pretty much been abandoned by everyone he’d ever cared about, from what I knew of his situation.  

Maybe I could figure something out between now and whenever he planned to go there.  “Well... okay.”

Jack’s response was a surprisingly strong hug, considering how cold he still was.  

“Exactly when were you thinking of going?”

“Sunday.”

“As in this Sunday?”

He nodded.  So much for having time to figure this out.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the last part about Ven that contains any real news to people reading this, but there is some more to him that Jack doesn't necessarily know (I haven't decided whether or not Jack knows some of this and it may, but probably won't be mentioned later in the story.) Ven basically comes off as a complete jerk, which he should, to some degree, because Jack really didn't have a healthy relationship with him at all, but he has some redeeming qualities and I have reasons why he acted the way he did, however it wasn't really relevant and seemed to distract a bit from the main story, so I decided not to include it. That said, I wanted to add it here if anyone wants to know.  
> Venjamin Fisher was the eldest son of a very strict Orthodox rabbi in Israel. He left home on bad terms with his family and studied medicine in London. He's smart, massively cynical, an atheist, and was incredibly hedonistic when he first arrived. His first year at school, he aced his classes, got addicted to numerous drugs, and basically slept with anyone who'd have him. Whether by being so promiscuous or by sharing needles, he contracted HIV and was eventually diagnosed after it progressed to AIDS. He had a bit of a mental breakdown and was very careful not to spread it for a little while, but pretty much knowing that he was going to die made him seriously depressed and ultimately suicidal. As a result, he started using drugs even more, although he tried not to share needles when he was thinking clearly. He was very careful not to spread it through sex, however, which is why, much to Jack's confusion, he stayed completely chaste in their relationship. He did actually care for Jack very much, just not as much as Jack cared about him. Knowing that he'd probably die a very slow and painful death or live a short and painful life, Ven decided to kill himself around the time he saved Jack's life. He rescued Jack because he felt, and was proved correct enough for his own satisfaction, that Jack could live a very long and happy life, and he couldn't tolerate watching a healthy person who was just emotionally scarred commit suicide when Venjamin couldn't bring himself to do it himself. He didn't love Jack as more than a friend, although he was attracted to him; his main goal through being with Jack was to convince him not to kill himself while Ven hoped that, once Jack was happy, he'd be able to commit suicide more easily. Ultimately, he became too depressed to really help Jack and started using drugs more frequently. Addicted to heroin, he ended up finding the "strength" to overdose intentionally one night. He didn't expect Jack to show up and had left a suicide note in Jack's dorm, trying to ensure that Jack didn't follow his example. Jack never actually went back to his dorm after Ven died, however, so the letter was lost. When Jack happened upon Ven after he OD'ed, Ven said what he did in an effort to make Jack hate him so the Scotsman wouldn't be so upset and thus would be able to go on and live a happier life.  
> So Ven's still a jerk, but he had his reasons.


	30. Auld Lang Syne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a song title, as usual, this one just done by too many different groups and singers for me to name a specific one. Despite the references to Arcade's past and the themes and issues of his personal quest in the game, I chose the title mostly because this chapter deals primarily with both his past and Jack's as well as the two of them (Jack more than Arcade) debating what things from their past they should value and which to disregard.

The next hour or so consisted of me forcing myself to stay awake to monitor Jack’s pulse and make sure he got back up to a more normal body temperature.  Even under the blankets and everything, it took a while.  He lay so still that I was pretty sure he’d fallen asleep until he broke the silence with a very quiet and unexpected admission.  

“I...I jumped off a bridge into the Thames a few winters ago.  It was actually how I met Ven.  I guess I have a history of dating people who’ve saved my life.  Well, as much a history as two people can be.  It kinda obliterated the idea that I might just pretend to be straight to appease my family, because when...well, when he died...  I mean, he’d saved my life, and been the first guy I’d ever dated— and I admit I probably got...a bit quixotic about the whole idea of being with him— and he’d pretty much gotten me through that year or so of college and kept me happier than I could ever remember being, so, yeah, it kind of...hit me hard when...when he OD’ed.”

That hugely emotional outburst had caught me close enough to falling asleep that, suddenly more awake, it took me a few minutes to process it.  In the meantime, Jack backtracked.  “Sorry, that kind of came out of nowhere, I just...I wanted to let you know, I guess.  Sorry I’m such an emotional wreck.”

I didn’t miss that none of that seemed related to the phone call that had gotten him so upset earlier in the night, but it also sounded like he’d just told me details he’d left out of his explanation for why he was so at odds with his family.  I wondered briefly if he was telling me this as some way of deflecting from the phone call, but that could just be my paranoid instincts.  More importantly, he really seemed to think he was pathetic for being so emotionally vulnerable right now.  Seeing how miserable he looked curled up as close to me as possible seemed to confirm this.  

I moved down in the bed to actually be eye-to-eye with him as his face was still about chest level to me, given how far he’d burrowed under the blankets to get warm.  

“Jack.  Seriously.  The things you’ve been through would leave most people permanently checked into an asylum; PTSD is nothing to be ashamed of.”  He was crying silently, not sobbing, but his eyes were watering.  The tears ran sideways with gravity, leaving a faint salt trail over the bridge of his nose and across his right cheek along with a barely visible wet spot on the sheets.  I think it was mostly seeing him like that that prompted me to admit.  “Look... Jack, I lost my father when I was very young and I still haven’t gotten over it, you’ve lost practically everyone you’ve ever known, some of them in violent deaths that you witnessed.  Considering everything you’ve been through, you’re amazingly well-adjusted.”

*       *       *

That completely surprised me.  I mean, I guess my life was kind of...eventful, but I’d never really felt like I had any right to consider it difficult; when I got into bad situations, it was usually with survival experts or my mother, who had always seemed nigh invulnerable, and when I wasn’t finding danger Indiana Jones style, I had a lifestyle that had pretty much been the lap of luxury.  I mean, I did spend a lot of time miserable and my social life had always seemed inevitably cursed, but all my real misfortune, by my judging, had been so focused on one area of my life (with the possible exception of the few months I’d been homeless) that I’d never felt I had any right to feel this broken down.  I had money, even when I hadn’t had access to it, and with that I had the kind of resources that my mother had always implied denied me any right to be miserable.  Granted, growing up I’d learned this lesson when she went to the point of taking me to Africa to actually meet kids dying of starvation the first time I’d refused to eat something she’d served.  That was probably part of the reason that now I hesitated to turn my nose up at even the most questionable cuisine; my mother had taken teaching gratitude to new levels.  Even when I’d been suicidal, I’d always felt that my life had never justified being truly miserable, and that had made it worse, because it meant that I felt guilty for my misery.  

Thinking about what Arcade had just said, I wondered if maybe he might actually be right.  Either that or we were both emotional wrecks.  

“That’s...probably the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“I’m serious, Jack.  You’re a more functional person than men who’ve only lost one close relative like that, don’t beat yourself up about it.”

*       *      *

He stared like this was a completely foreign concept.  And then he looked away and apologized again.  “Sorry.  It’s just...well, I was kind of never taught to see it that way.  I guess usually when I got emotional as a kid it just wasn’t a good time.  My mom typically told me to shut up and deal with it, but to be fair a lot of that was when we got stranded somewhere, or when she had to drive me some place.  She was always pretty busy, so I guess she didn’t have time to deal with me having a fit or anything.  If I had to go somewhere with her, we were on a schedule and that didn’t change if I was upset.  I guess that was sort of how I got as comfortable with cars as I am.”  

Now I had to stare.  “Are you saying your mother got you over the trauma of the crash that killed your father by _forcing you into cars anyway_?  Didn’t she realize that was a bit more than just a kid throwing a tantrum?”

He shrugged like that was completely normal and not abuse equating psychological torture.  “We had a schedule so she just told me I was being melodramatic, strapped me in, and off we went.  I got used to it eventually.”

No doubt with serious emotional scarring.  I barely kept myself for blurting that out aloud.  Instead, trying not to openly insult his mother, I had to ask, “Um...didn’t she realize that your reaction just _might_ be PTSD?”

He shrugged again.  “She never really put much stock into psychology.”

I stared blankly.  “Jack, PTSD is kind of among the most clearly evidenced of all psychological illnesses.”  He shrugged yet again and I sighed.  “No offense, Jack, but your mother is insane.”  Not to mention fucking abusive.  I knew immediately that I’d said the wrong thing.  

Jack got that hollow look in his eyes and avoided my gaze.  

*       *       *

That statement hurt.  I more vividly felt the cold gob of sadness that had settled into my stomach since the most recent phone call even though I’d nearly managed to pretend it wasn’t there.  I wanted to forget that new wound, at least for a while, at least until I had time to heal from all the old ones.  I couldn’t quite comprehend the fact that she was really gone.  Before I’d understood that she was gone because she was alive.  I could accept her choosing to cast me from her life easily enough, I had accepted the fact that I would never see her again and that was easy enough to accept again, but for my entire life I could not remember a single time when she was there, protecting me, and I had not felt completely safe.  We could be in the wilds of Siberia, the African savanna, or the back alleys of Beijing and yet I’d always felt like nothing could ever hurt or stop her.  I’d trusted her completely.  She’d gotten me out of every bad situation and I’d never felt that I was seriously in danger when I was with her until the day she had turned against me.  

She’d terrified me.  When my mother had screamed at me and chased me out, it had been the first real fight we’d ever had and I’d been less afraid staring down that grizzly.  I’d fully expected to be killed if I didn’t run for the door, and I wasn’t sure that assumption had been wrong.  I had never seen my mother so irate.  

Even now, even after all that, there was still a part of me that trusted her that completely, and I just couldn’t wrap my mind around her death right now any more than I could really comprehend the idea that she had been wrong about me.  I mean, I had never willingly let myself believe it, but there was always that voice in the back of my mind insisting that my family had been right all along.  I wanted to convince myself that I didn’t care what my mother would have thought and whether or not she might have changed her opinion, but I did care, and I wasn’t sure I could really convince myself otherwise if I tried.  

Arcade must have realized how deeply what he’d said had gotten to me.  “Jack...”

I didn’t move.  I heard him, I was just too shaken.  What if my mother really was wrong about me?  Could I even believe that?  

I guess Arcade thought I hadn’t heard him because he pulled me up into a hug that more or less forced me to look at him.  I did, but stayed silent.  “Jack, I’m sorry, but she’s wrong.”

*       *       *

I almost thought he was having a flashback or something from the blank stare he was giving me.  He sighed thoughtfully and stretched out, rolling onto his back and slipping free of my arms.  At least he wasn’t freezing anymore.  

He lay like that for a moment, just thinking.  “...I _want_ to believe that.”

“It’s true.  Seriously.  Being traumatized by everything you’ve been through isn’t `being melodramatic.’  It’s natural.  Hell, I’d be concerned if you _weren’t_ a bit shaken up after all that.  You’d have to be some kind of psychopath to lose so much, so quickly and be unfazed.”

He rolled back over to face me.  He seemed like he had something to say, but he hesitated.  “Were...?”  He trailed off awkwardly.  Looking away again, he added, “Never mind.”  Jack scooted up in the bed and occupied himself fluffing and adjusting the pillows, clearly trying to gloss over whatever he’d been about to ask in a show of getting ready to sleep.  

I moved up to more easily watch his expression; I didn’t want to be prying into something he truly didn’t want to talk about, but if he just felt awkward, it might help to ask.  This seemed like he was just being awkward.  “Jack, it’s alright, what did you want to ask me?”

He paused, his hands idly smoothing out the pillowcase.  “...I was just wondering...how exactly did you end up with only these people as your family?”

Once again, Jack completely blindsided me with something he said.  

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to answer.  On one hand, I felt like I owed Jack some kind of explanation, and I really did want to be honest with him, even about this.  On the other hand, years of experience told me to lie, or at least leave out most of the truth.  When I actually told people, particularly lovers, about my past, it had never gone over well.  Besides, the memories were still very painful.  ...But this was Jack I was dealing with, not someone else.  He’d been through so much and probably opened up to me about at least half of it, didn’t I owe him the same, at least to some degree?

*       *       *

Arcade sighed.  “I already told you that my father died when I was very young.”  He paused after that sentence and hesitated several other times in his explanation, like he wasn’t sure how much he should tell me.  “He worked with these people as well as my mother and he died on a mission with them.  I don’t know much more about that and I can’t tell you what I do know, I’m sorry.  My mother died when I was eighteen.  She didn’t drive, so she road a bicycle everywhere and, well, bikes don’t fare well against drunk truck drivers.”  

I stared even though I tried not to.  He sounded like he’d had a pretty rough life as well.  “Sorry.  Are you alright?”

“It happened a long time ago, Jack.  Besides, you’ve already told me most of the bad things you’ve had to deal with.  Fair is fair.”  I could tell the memory was still painful.  

I bobbled my head.  “I suppose.  But I don’t want to make you talk about it if you don’t want to.”

He shrugged and rolled onto his back.  It was pretty late and it seemed like he wanted to go to sleep, but didn’t want to fall asleep if I still wanted to talk, so he was waiting to be sure.  It was already late enough that I felt ready to sleep myself, which was surprising given my usual insomnia.  But I had one more question for him and I still couldn’t get what he had said off my mind.  Gears were spinning in place and I knew that with my brain this active I’d never be able to sleep no matter how tired I was.  

I scooted a little closer to Arcade, still lying mostly on my stomach.  Rolling over had left us practically as far apart as we could be in the large bed, and I didn’t want to be so far away from him, or for him to think that I wanted to stay that far away from him because of what he’d said.  I looked over at him and he blinked back.  I think he understood that I wanted to say something.  

“...If you don’t mind my asking, don’t you have cousins or uncles or anything?  You’ve told me about your parents, and I think you said that you’re an only child, and it’s alright if you don’t want to answer, I’m just...curious.”

He considered me for a moment, but he wasn’t upset.  “You have a large family, don’t you?  I don’t think I have any cousins or anything; if my parents had siblings, I never knew about them.  I don’t really know anything about my grandparents either and I certainly never met them.  Like I said, these folks are my family, or at least what’s left of it.”

*       *       *

Jack nodded he looked slightly sad, but when he spoke, he smiled sincerely.  “You’re lucky.  You’re very close to them.  I do have a large family, or rather I did, my mom had eleven sisters, all younger than her, and you know my dad’s younger brother, Teagan.  My mom’s sisters all had kids of their own, all my cousins are older than me, I wasn’t close to most of them, and I think at least a few sort of shunned me even before my family found out about everything.”

I rolled onto my side.  “You sound like you miss them a lot.”

He shrugged, but it was clearly just denial.  “I wasn’t that close to most of them.”

“Well, at least your mother sounds like she might forgive you.  Maybe the rest of them might follow her lead?”  I was trying to cheer him up, but I guess I just reminded him of how much he missed his family because he closed his eyes and froze.  His breathing caught in his throat loud enough that I could hear it threatening to become a sob.  He would have broken down when I said that, he was just fighting it.  

I pulled Jack into another hug and he did break down while I tried to cheer him up.  “You still have your sister, right?  And your uncle Teagan?”  At this point I was just grasping at straws.  Was I really the right person to be talking to him right now?  My family wasn’t even related to me, I couldn’t say I really understood exactly what he was going through.  Not that he had anyone else to talk to about it.  

He cried longer than I’d expected him to, but it was still only several minutes and I wouldn’t let myself sleep while he was in this state.  Jack snuggled against my chest as his breathing got back to normal.  I’d almost nodded off when he suddenly admitted, “There’ve been a lot of times I’ve felt like my family— my mother— was right— that writing what I write, dating who I date, being gay, being who I am— was some kind of abomination, some horrible sin...”  His tone varied wildly.  He started in a whisper I could barely understand, rose until he was almost yelling, and then trailed off.  I could hear the hate in his voice, but didn’t know if he hated his family, what they believed, what he believed, or himself.  I just hoped it wasn’t the last option.  

“Jack,” I leaned back to actually see his face— he’d buried his head in my chest again— “they _are_ wrong about you.  There’s nothing wrong with what you do, or who you are.”

He gave me a strange look; I couldn’t decipher the emotion behind it.  After another few silent seconds, Jack admitted, “I want to trust my mother, though.  Even on this.  I don’t want to believe she’s wrong, even when it means... what it means.”

I didn’t respond immediately mainly because I had to head off my gut instinct to say exactly what I thought about his mother.  I didn’t normally advocate anyone hating their parents, but in Jack’s case I made an exception.  If his mother had left him this completely screwed up through the way she had raised him, it was probably healthier if she _didn’t_ accept him.  Maybe if she pushed him away enough, he’d actually stop caring what she thought and be much happier because of that.  I certainly didn’t want Jack going back to Scotland permanently, now for his sake as well as mine.  

“Jack, your mother is wrong.  I’m sorry but, she’s wrong about this.  Really.  You can’t blindly trust her opinion, especially when it’s going against who you are.  You’re your own man, Jack.”

Again with the strangely puzzled stares.  “You believe what you need to believe.”

I stared back, baffled.  “Is that a statement or a command?”

“A realization.”

*       *       *

He looked slightly offended.  “Jack, I believe what I feel is right, I don’t just change my morality to ease my conscience, and you shouldn’t either.  What do _you_ believe is right?  Have your own morality.  Sure it’s probably going to be influenced by your family, but it doesn’t have to be exactly the same.  Do you believe that they’re actually right about you?”  I got the sense that he was wondering if I could even live with that, if I did.  Heck, he probably knew more about psychology than I did and god knows my issues were obvious; he was probably afraid I’d try to kill myself if I actually felt like my family’s beliefs were right.  

I didn’t answer right away.  Honestly, my only real moral belief was a desire to be as honest as I could.  Honest in that I didn’t lie outright; I could distort, mislead, and omit all I wanted, I just tried not to say anything that was completely untrue.  At least that was what I told myself at the time.  In retrospect, it did bother me being in these relationships simultaneously when Arcade believed that I was only involved with him.  I _was_ perfectly alright with the Legion, and everything they did, and at the time I really didn’t care about all the people they hurt and killed.  I guess I was kind of a selfish ass like that, and I was still too afraid of losing anyone else to dare chose between my dangerously intelligent and antipodean paramours.  Beyond that, however, I really didn’t have morals that I knew of.  Right and wrong was just a non-issue for me in most of the rest of my life.  I didn’t see why it mattered.  

Of course, I was not about to openly admit that to Arcade.  He’d probably freak out if I even said I just wasn’t interested in my own morality.  I had to answer carefully.  

“I’m...not really sure what I believe.  I don’t want to feel like pretty much everything I do is a moral crime, but I also don’t want to dismiss my mother’s beliefs, the morality I was pretty much raised on.”  It was also a true statement, it just ignored the fact that even if I believed what I was doing was wrong, in terms of what I did for a living, what I did in bed, and who I slept with, I wasn’t going to change my actions if god himself walked in and told me to stop.  Whether or not I felt my mother was right just changed how guilty I felt about it all, and in that case, I guess it would be better if I dismissed everything she’d taught me, but that was no easier than accepting her death.  She was never wrong and she could never die.  

Arcade sighed.  “Look, I can’t tell you what to believe, and I can’t say I don’t understand wanting to have some loyalty to your past, but if it’s going to make your life miserable...  It’s just not healthy to have a morality like that; either you need to change your life or you need to change your beliefs, and I really don’t think that who you are is the sort of stuff you can change.”

“...Good point.”  It sounded like he had some latent issue with this, and it made me curious.  “...Arcade?  What do you mean you understand wanting to have loyalty to your past?  I thought you didn’t really know much about your family aside from your mother, and it sounds like you’re talking about a different kind of issue?”

He backpedaled.  “Um...Well, what does anyone mean by loyalty to the past?  I mean, it’s just a phrase, right?  I guess I just meant...um...I don’t know.  Just saying what came to mind, I guess.  It’s late.  I’m tired.  I’m not thinking clearly.  But I meant the rest of what I said.  You should be alright with the man you are, Jack, especially with the things you can’t change.”  

He got more comfortable, clearly trying to end the conversation and go to sleep and I let him.  If he deflected that desperately, I wasn’t going to pry, although I was curious.  I went to sleep surprisingly peacefully, distracted from all my worries by the moral debate that had been ignited by that conversation, a bonfire to distract from the many gathering storms.  


	31. The Infection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter named for a song by Disturbed. Title might be more appropriate for the next chapter.

I hadn’t set an alarm or anything, not that the clock was even showing the right time any more after the power outage.  I’d expected to wake up fairly early just because that was what usually happened when I was on a more normal sleeping schedule, and sharing a bed with Jack, I fully expected to be awakened at least twice by his nightmares and yet, surprisingly, he seemed to sleep peacefully through the night.  He was still asleep when I woke up; he’d sprawled across the bed with one arm wrapped across my chest and his head nearly cutting off the circulation in my arm.  I squirmed out of his grip just enough to check the clock...and realize that it was definitely not three in the morning.  I checked my phone instead.  The battery had died, probably because it had been struggling to find signal out here where there was no reception.  I sighed and lay back down.  The curtains were cracked open and it seemed fairly bright outside, maybe it was ten in the morning or so?  

I wasn’t tired at this point, but I almost wanted to go back to sleep just so I wouldn’t disturb Jack.  He was sleeping peacefully for a change, and I felt like he needed that after everything he’d been through.  I didn’t necessarily need to go back to sleep, but I did want to stay where I was, which wasn’t a problem.  I had a lot to think about.  He’d invited me to Scotland in about two days.  Getting the time off wasn’t really a problem at this point; I had a bad tendency to feel guilty for taking vacation, given what I did, and Julie knew this.  I hadn’t used most of the vacation time I got since I’d first started working at the hospital, and considering that despite my best efforts, she was pretty well aware of how serious my relationship with Jack had gotten and how violently precarious his well-being seemed to be, I doubted she’d take issue with me asking for a few more days off.  I wasn’t the best doctor there anyway.  The main problem would be getting through customs, or, heck, even getting through airport security would probably be an issue for me.  Maybe Johnson would have some suggestion about that?

Jack jolted awake, startling me.  There was no sign he was having a nightmare; he went straight from peaceful sleep to a violent twitch and opening his eyes.  He blinked at me as he calmed down.  

“Nightmare?”

Jack nodded.  “Just at the very end.”

Considering that he hadn’t mentioned a single good dream, I had to admit I was curious, but he changed the subject before I could ask.  

“What time is it?”

I shrugged and gestured towards the window.  “Ten?  I’m guessing?”

Jack sat up and considered.  “It’s hard to tell with the snow, it looks so bright...”

“The clocks aren’t right and my phone’s dead, so I’d say ten, judging from the light.”  

Jack got up and checked his phone.  “My phone says three in the afternoon, but it usually takes days to get the time right after daylight savings or when I travel, so it’s probably wrong.”

Accepting the fact that we couldn’t know what time it was, we got dressed and packed under the assumption that it was early morning and we’d be heading back to the city later in the day.  We walked into the dining room that had once been the lobby of the resort to find the others all awake and playing bridge.  Well, Daisy, Judah, Johnson, and Moreno were playing bridge, Henry was probably working, as usual.  It was what he did.  

Seeing us, Daisy smiled.  “Well, good morning!  You two certainly slept in!”  She interrupted Moreno and Johnson— playing as partners because they managed to be less antagonistic towards each other if they were on the same team.  The two of them seemed to be arguing over some card Johnson had played and why he hadn’t played lower; it wasn’t surprising, the two usually played as partners and Moreno typically insisted on being the declarer whether or not his cards made that practical, it was sort of obnoxious.  Luckily they settled for exchanging glares after Daisy interrupted them.  Jack had the tact to annoy my grumpy friends.  He grinned back at Daisy, looking slightly confused, “What time is it, anyway?”

I’d assumed that Daisy had just meant that I was usually awake very early, and was surprised when she casually explained, “four in the afternoon, we were almost gonna check on you.  The roads are clear right now, and as long as we make it out of the mountains by midnight, we should be fine.  You boys can have breakfast and maybe join us for a few more hands, if you want, and then we can head back to the city?”

Jack, predictably, looked to me.  I was starting to wonder how he’d act if he didn’t have someone basically tell him what to do, in a much milder sense than the phrase implied.  It sounded like his mother had shepherded him around for most of his life, and now he either shadowed me or followed my lead in most public situations.  If he was on his own, did he just freeze or could he actually act as a competent adult and he just defaulted to following my lead because he was so used to that with his mother?  

“Yeah, that sounds good.  We’ll get breakfast and be back.”

Judah got up, casting an exasperated look towards Moreno and Johnson, which they both failed to notice.  “I’ll see if Henry and Calamity can join us for a few hands, that way we have enough for two tables of cards.”  

*       *       *

The afternoon, or what was left of it, went significantly better than last night had gone.  Arcade and I had pancakes and as much as the food reminded me of home, making them with Arcade and playing bridge with his family while we ate got me over the painful memories.  None of them even seemed to notice.  It was funny, really, being with all of them playing cards and chatting I sort of felt like I was part of a family again.  They were really close-knit, even my own family had never been this close.  I mean, I was fairly close to my sister, and aside from my secrets and her resolute stance on my complaining, I’d considered myself very close to my mother, but my aunts and cousins had always just...existed.  We talked, and sort of pretended we liked each other, I guess, observing all the social niceties and giving gifts and such, but there’d always been a coldness beneath the surface.  Arcade’s family were all guarded, and sometimes a bit tense, they clearly had their secrets, but the feelings were honest.  Daisy and Johnson were even what I might call warm to me.  

And then, after cards, once we were loading up the Snow Cat with stuff to take to the car, Calamity brought Rex out to see me.  The dog practically tore his leash out of her hand with his scramble to greet me and even with the cart, he nearly knocked me over.  Aside from a bandage between his furry ears and a plastic cone around his neck, he looked perfectly healthy.  He seemed like he’d aged backwards he was so excited.  I knelt to pet the enthusiastic dog, holding him back from licking my face.  

“He’s healthy?” I asked Doc Henry, mostly worried the tumor might have been cancerous or something.  

The doc nodded.  “Surprisingly, the tumor was benign and the surgery went well.  I’ve never seen a dog this old recover so quickly; he’s quite the impressive specimen.”  

“From what I’ve heard, he’s been through a lot.”  I scratched Rex behind one pointed ear, wondering exactly what the dog had been through.  I’d wondered the same thing about Turing a lot, but that little terrier was younger and less obviously traumatized.  Well, maybe not traumatized: Rex certainly seemed well-adjusted, it was just that he’d lost limbs in his adventures.  It shook me a little to realize that I’d be seeing my dog, my horse, probably all my animals in a few days, assuming all went well, which was doubtful.  

Loading the car, even including Rex in his crate, was much easier now that we weren’t bothering with all the coolers.  Now that everything had been eaten, we were mostly loading suitcases.  Everyone opted to leave the empty coolers at the resort with Henry and get them at some point later when they visited again.  Again, considering Arcade and I were by far the youngest people involved and even though most of his family refused to let us do _all_ the work, we still did most of the heavy lifting, and as there was still a great deal to load onto the Snow Cat and then from there into the cars, we were both very busy.  

As a result, we were separated during most of the loading process.  I was with Moreno most of that time because, oddly enough, he seemed pretty friendly towards me and as familiarity breeds contempt, the others had had enough of him for a while.  He and I lugged his suitcase to the Snow Cat while Arcade helped Daisy with her luggage.  Henry had already said goodbye to everyone and gone back to work, although Calamity hung around to help, probably because somebody needed to drive the Snow Cat back to the resort after we all left.  Going back to the lodge after loading Moreno’s massive trunk of stuff into the Snow Cat, I got my own stuff and went to wait in the lobby as I just had one small bag.  

The resort was pretty quite and I had very good hearing; walking through the hallway towards the lobby, I heard Johnson, Judah, and Moreno talking while they waited.  

“...the guy’s alright by me, but still.  Bringing a civilian up here, with us?  What was Arcade _thinking_?”

“We’re _all_ civilians now, Moreno.  And he nearly killed the guy in a car accident— in _two_ car accidents— he felt guilty and he felt sorry for Jack.  You can see as well as I can how much he cares about him; he probably trusts him with this.”

“Has he told him?”  The voice was quiet and I hadn’t heard it often; it was Judah.  His tone was cautious, not hostile nor friendly.  

Johnson replied, “No, I doubt it.  But he might, and I think we can trust the kid.  He’s been through a hell of a lot, stories aside.  He’s got that look to him.”

Moreno wasn’t so easily swayed, “The kid hasn’t been to war, he’s just a boy.  He won’t understand, and he’d better not find out.  I’m alright if—”

“You’re alright if he helps you win at gambling, but if he just wants to—”  

Judah cut Johnson off, “Calm down.  He doesn’t know and if he does, he doesn’t care.  He isn’t even American.  It’s Arcade’s business what the boy knows and we all agreed it was alright for him to bring the boy here.  Nothing happened.  Everything turned out fine aside from the weather.  From the sound of things, the boy has no family of his own and no one else to spend the time with, besides, he was just getting out of the hospital for a head injury.  The kid’s been life’s punching bag for the past few months, at least, and nothing bad happened because he was here, let it go.”  He seemed to add specifically to Moreno, “Although I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for Arcade to trust him so completely.”

I hesitated awkwardly in the hallway, just out of sight, reluctant to keep walking and pretend I hadn’t heard them, but also not wanting to look like I’d been eavesdropping.  I was saved the trouble of deciding as Daisy and Arcade returned from loading their things into the Snow Cat.  Even though the conversation was over, Johnson, Moreno, and Judah must have looked awkwardly silent because Daisy remarked, “Gossiping?”

She was mostly joking, but her voice had enough edge to it to suggest some level of real annoyance.  Moreno made an irritable sort of grunt and I pretended I’d just gotten there and walked into the room.  As it turned out, Moreno, Johnson, and Judah were all facing the door, probably to look at Daisy and Arcade, so coming out of the hallway, I was behind them.   Because he was facing me and they weren’t, I quirked an eyebrow at Arcade, feigning ignorance of what had just happened.  Arcade caught sight of me before Daisy.  He clearly saw me and sort of nodded, but I could tell that he didn’t know how to diffuse the awkward silence any better than I did.  It was pretty obvious that Johnson and Moreno, at least, couldn’t stand much more of each other, so I wasn’t surprised when Judah ultimately announced, “Well, I think we’ve imposed on Henry’s hospitality long enough, let’s get down to the parking lot and part ways.”  

*      *       *

The silence continued in the Snow Cat with Jack awkwardly staring out the window at the snow and ice.  I think he was doing that because he felt awkward and not because the vehicle unsettled him; I got the sense that only automobiles bothered him and Snow Cats, at least, he felt comfortable with.  He certainly didn’t look afraid, unlike Rex, who whined and paced his cage until he was out of the vehicle.  

Jack and I sat in the back, so when we reached the parking lot and all the others froze in knee-high snow to stare at something, Jack and I were the last to see what had halted them.  When I saw it, I felt a chill along my spine that had nothing to do with the cold.  There was a set of tire tracks in the snow that didn’t belong to any of our vehicles.  Moreno grumbled his own theory about it and started to pack his things into his Hummer while Daisy shrugged and did the same with Johnson’s.  Judah and Johnson exchanged a glance and investigated a bit further, trying to learn what they could from the tracks even though a good four inches of powder had buried the marks since the vehicle had left.  I looked at Jack.  He eyed the tracks and then met my gaze, his expression resolutely blank.  He knew what they were from, though at the time I presumed he was just guessing like I was.  The journalist, or rather the frumentarius, Vulpes, had been here last night, the marks must have been from whatever he drove up here.  A truck, judging by the size.  I would have wrapped an arm around Jack if I hadn’t been worried that doing so might lead my friends to realize that he was connected to this.  I’d just have to comfort him later.  I figured it bothered him and even if the phone call he’d gotten hadn’t upset him, I didn’t trust Vulpes to be kind and fully expected that the Legion man must have done something more to Jack while he’d been here.  As such, and having seen how well Jack could fake calm or even joy when he wanted to, I figured that this blank stare hid all the emotional trauma I’d come to expect from Jack.  Sooner or later this colossal run of bad luck had to end, and as long as I could get him through it, he’d hopefully come out of it a better, more emotionally stable man.  At least I cared about him too much not to try.  

While Judah and Johnson pondered the tracks in hushed tones, Jack and I helped Daisy load the car.  Calamity leaned on the Snow Cat, smoking a cigar and apparently enjoying the view of the lake, or at least she was staring off down the hill towards it.  Jack didn’t have a really heavy winter coat and even though I’d leant him a warmer jacket, around the time we finished loading Johnson’s Hummer, he started shivering violently and his hands were white.  What he was wearing would be fine for getting in and out of cars, but we’d been out here for fifteen minutes at least, moving some fairly heavy objects, so he was probably sweating.  Last night came to mind, particularly how severely hypothermic he’d gotten and I caught one of his hands, clasping it normally, but noting how cold his skin felt.  He wasn’t wearing gloves.  

“Jack, wait in the Hummer.  You’re freezing and I want to help Judah load his car as well.”

He nodded and went to do so, not saying anything.  Was he disoriented, one of the symptoms of hypothermia, or was he just distracted by whatever he’d gone through last night?  Johnson tapped me on the shoulder, snapping me out of my worries.  

“Arcade, you don’t know anything about those tracks in the snow, do you?”

Daisy packed the last of our stuff into Johnson’s hummer and went to say her farewells before waiting in the car.  I hesitated to answer him, but Moreno was out of earshot as well, talking to Judah now, so I admitted, “I think they were from this guy who’s been following Jack.  I’ve been trying to get rid of him.  He’s a dangerous character, but I don’t think he knows who we are.”

Johnson nodded, looking a little worried.  “Let’s try to keep it that way.  You know why he’s after Jack?”

As much as I trusted Johnson, telling him this guy was with the Legion seemed like it would end badly, probably just driving my family to protest me having anything to do with Jack.  That said, I couldn’t leave him completely in the dark.  “No, he seems like he’s just stalking him.  He’s... he’s bad news.  I think I have things under control, for the most part,” which was an absolute lie, but would hopefully calm Johnson and any of my family he told this to, “He’s broken into Jack’s house.  Before I moved in, he... well, he raped Jack.  He might have done something to him last night as well, I’m not sure.”

Johnson stared and then nodded grimly.  It showed the kind of things he’d done that he accepted that admittance so quickly.  “Be careful.  If you get rid of this guy, do it right, don’t get into trouble.  I can help if you need me to.”

“No.  It’s fine.”  I really wasn’t sure I could actually kill Vulpes anyway, partly because of the fact that he’d outmatched me every time we’d previously fought but more because of how Jack seemed to have been Stockholm Syndromed by him or something.  I didn’t want to find out what would happen if Jack lost someone else he cared about even if that person _was_ an abusive asshole.  

Thinking of Jack reminded me of something else.  “Hey, Johnson, do you know any way of getting around customs?  Airport security might be tricky as well, actually.”  

*       *       *

I fell asleep pretty soon after we all left Tahoe and didn’t wake up until long after the snow chains had been taken off.  Sleep was how I dealt with cars, how I’d dealt with them for a while, really, as well as how I dealt with planes and most vehicles.  Sleep was how I dealt with emotions too, sometimes, either by sleeping or by feigning sleep to think when I couldn’t paint or write.  Sleep was how I dealt with a lot of things when I wasn’t struggling with insomnia.  It just didn’t help that I had so many nightmares.  

I jolted awake from the same augural one, still feeling like my hands were soaked in blood after my eyes snapped open and I remembered where I really was.  

It was night, the amber streetlights flashing by and civilization shown only as a haze of light splattered over the pitch black hills.  It was pouring rain, pelting the windshield until it looked like we were driving through a waterfall.  Daisy and Johnson hadn’t noticed me jolt awake, and they were talking about the rain.  “...weird weather.”

“I’ve never seen it rain this much in years.  Horrible storms we’ve been having lately.”

“There’ll be mudslides up here for sure, but I guess we should be grateful there should be less fires.”

“Last year was bad for fires, wasn’t it?”

I tuned them out, realizing that Arcade was looking at me when he asked, “Are you alright, Jack?”

Daisy looked back, probably wondering why he was saying that and I felt like Johnson was just as curious; the attention made me uncomfortable.  “I’m fine, it was just another nightmare.”  Between my dream and having everyone focused on me, I felt the tension creeping back into my muscles and my heart started racing.  I stared out the window to calm down, grateful that at least there weren’t many cars near us on the highway.  It was probably after midnight.  

In the back, Rex whined, I guess he picked up on my fear or else he just heard my voice and wanted to be with me.  I wanted to pet him, but I just had to tell myself that I’d be able to once we were home.  _My_ home.  My new home.  It still felt weird.  

As if reading my mind, Arcade explained, “We’ll be back in the city in an hour or so.  You said your sister was in the area?”

My eyes snapped wide.  “Oh.  Right.”  I’d completely forgotten about her in the aftermath of last night.  I dug my phone out of my pocket, ignoring Arcade’s and Daisy’s stares somewhere between confusion and shock that I’d actually forgotten that.  Daisy was probably a bit surprised that I even had a sister, let alone that she was out here.

“Your sister is in the city, right?  I wasn’t misunderstanding that?”

I nodded, skimming the texts.  “Yeah.  I’m...just not positive _where_.”

He face-palmed.  “Jack, how old is your sister?”

“Ten.  But yesterday was...complicated.  And she was with a friend.”

He raised an eyebrow.  I think he was wondering who I meant and he wasn’t going to like the answer.  I found a text from Vulpes among the more recent ones.  I’d gotten half a dozen in the past few days, more than I usually got in a month, and most were from Mila.  

*       *      *

Jack, who had just proved himself to be stupendously irresponsible if he hadn’t already, suddenly relaxed.  “She’s fine.  She’s being taken care of and staying mostly on my couch.  She’s in good hands.”

I wasn’t sure I believed that.  Whose good hands was he talking about?  “Okay...”

Jack explained, mostly for the benefit of Daisy and Johnson, that his sister had gotten a hold of their mother’s credit cards and flown to the city trying to track Jack down.  She’d succeeded and the rest of the ride mostly consisted of Jack chatting about his sister in response to Daisy’s curiosity.  I could guess two reasons she might be so fascinated.  For one, I’d implied Jack had no family willing to speak to him, and Jack explained that he’d discounted his sister because he’d presumed that his mother would have taken any means the girl had to stay in touch with him, or otherwise turned Mila against him.  The second reason, which Daisy thankfully never mentioned directly, was that, given my sexuality, the fact that she’d been like a mother to me, and the fact that she really didn’t have any other children, literally or otherwise, meant that Mila was the closest she would get to grandchildren.  Currently, the girl was young enough that Daisy would probably treat her like a grandchild and years from now, if I was still with Jack and his sister ever had kids, they’d pretty much be as close to real grandchildren as she was likely to have.  At least unless Jack and I ever got so serious as to adopt, but that wasn’t even on the horizon just yet and just having that possibility cross my mind I felt my heart skip a beat.  Right now I just wanted him to get through all his grief and hopefully reach a point where he wasn’t risking death on a daily basis.  

We got back an hour later, still in the middle of the torrential downpour, which had persisted off and on since we’d left the mountains.  At least it was shaping up to be a year with few fires.  Between lugging our own things up to Jack’s porch and helping Daisy with hers, all of us were practically fireproof we were so completely soaked.  I don’t think I could have been more drenched if I’d gone for a swim, and with my glasses covered in droplets, I was as good as blind.  I wasn’t sure if it was my fall up the stairs, Jack helping me up afterwards, both of us moving all the luggage to the porch, or the constant squishing of our clothes and shoes that alerted those inside to our presence, but the door swung open before we were quite up the stairs.  

Veronica peered down at us, looking remarkably cozy with a knitted scarf around her head even though the rest of her clothes were much lighter.  “Man!  You two should _really_ dry off.  I can help move this stuff inside, where do you want it?”  

Rex barked and Veronica focused on the dog crate among the small pile.  It was big, I doubt she’d missed it, it just seemed like she’d focused on us before the dog, but now she bent down and cooed at Rex, “Aww, you’re back!  Are you all better?  Did you miss your home?”

The dog barked happily, his tail slapping against the inside of the crate as I attempted to dry off my glasses so I could actually see.  Jack let the dog out and into the house to greet everyone, giving Veronica a few seconds for Rex to greet her before the big dog clattered past to investigate other new smells.  My attempt to dry my glasses went about as well as trying to mop up the Pacific Ocean, and I gave up.  I should be able to see well enough to get inside and dry off at this point.  

“We don’t have much and we need to dry off anyway.”  Jack took off the jacket I’d leant him and attempted to squeeze the water out of it as gently as possible, succeeding in little more than making squishing sounds.  Neither of us were getting anywhere with this, and the futility of his overly-careful attempt made me smile.  

“Jack, it’s old and cheap, you don’t need to be so gentle with it.”  I had my own coat off, but it was clearly too soaked to wring out.  I looked for a good place to hang it out here, below the upstairs balcony rather than bringing it in to soak Jack’s house.  

Jack tried a bit more roughly to stop the jacket from dripping before he gave up.  He saw me considering the porch lamp and looking for some nail or hook on the wall and apparently realized what I was trying to do.  “Just hang it in the closet, I can put a towel or something on the floor.”  

We both did as he suggested while Veronica moved our almost as sopping luggage into the hallway.  Further inside the house, someone paused a movie and we were joined in the hallway by Raul, Gibson, and a girl that was unmistakably Jack’s sister. 

Her eyes were as violet as his and their faces were very similar except that something about the proportions and bone structure around their eyes gave her a serious, almost aloof appearance while it made Jack look mildly clueless.  It was probably just the height and tilt of their eyebrows, or maybe the fact that his were colorful, curved, and a little uneven while hers were dark, dense, and perfectly straight.  She had an abundance of curly black hair restrained by a white headband but almost as long, proportionately, as Jack’s had been before the skull fracture, and wild while his had been so flat and straight as to be defiant of any styling attempt.  She wore a dark green plaid dress of the same tartan as Jack’s kilt and pajamas.  All in all, she resembled a stereotypical schoolgirl so perfectly that I presumed the dress was a school uniform, but even so something about her unsettled me and I could not for the life of me figure out what exactly that was.  

Seeing Jack, she beamed, started towards him and then hesitated.  “You’re sopping wet!  Did ya swim here?”  Her accent, despite appearances, was strong and so spectacularly lilting that I could barely understand her.  Her voice was also significantly higher in pitch than I had expected, even from a little girl.  

Jack laughed and reverted slightly to his own accent, although him I understood.  “Mila!  And you were afraid I’d be killed in a fire if I moved to California.  Quite the opposite, I’ve nearly been killed by a lot of things here, but none of them flame-related.  You wore _that_ dress?  Are you trying to look like you ran away from school?”

I wasn’t sure Jack should be tempting fate by saying that fire hadn’t come close to killing him, but at least his sister apparently understood his terrible luck.  

Before I could attempt to introduce myself, Mila ordered, “Both of you are absolutely drookit, dry yourselves off and then we can chat.”  Jack had started to say something after the first half of her statement, so I presumed that she added the latter part to stop him.  The girl punctuated her statement by turning around and striding back into the living room without another word.  Jack was apparently quite used to this and set off upstairs without a word while I exchanged a surprised look with Raul, Gibson, and Veronica.  

Vero shrugged and added, “Well, you are drenched.”

Raul chucked.  “The girl’s got spunk.  I like her.”  

I shrugged.  “I guess I was going to dry off anyway...”  The three of them rejoined Mila in the living room while I followed Jack upstairs.  He’d already gotten a set of towels and changed his pants, but he was still shirtless.  The stitched cuts on his chest had mostly healed, although they still needed a bandage just because with his luck and lifestyle, I didn’t trust the wounds to stay closed.  He’d removed the bandage that had covered them, probably because it was as soaked as his thin shirt, which hung in the shower behind him while he gingerly dried around the sutures.  

I walked up to check the cuts, resting a hand on his shoulder once I was close enough to reach him.  He flinched.  He faced the mirror, though he wasn’t looking into it, but I was still surprised that I had startled him.  I hadn’t been walking particularly quietly, although I guess his own dripping clothes might have masked the sound, given the strange acoustics of the tile and glass.  He seemed distracted.  

“What is it?”

Avoiding my gaze, he mumbled, “Nothing.”  He dabbed the towel against his hair, trying to sop up what he could from the dripping mass.  His hair got notably darker when it was wet, it was almost black right now, but still lighter than his sister’s.  Mending the skull fracture had required a metal plate, so the bone was secure, but a jagged line of stitches curled through a scarred section of scalp on the back of his head.  He had quite a few scars, most of them only visible as thin white marks on his smooth skin and pretty much all of them typically hidden beneath his clothes; the skull fracture, however, was bound to scar as well, and he might never regrow hair over that part of the back of his head.  It would probably remain as a permanent and obvious reminder of how close I had come to accidentally killing him.  Right now I tried just to focus on making sure it didn’t look infected.  

Rather than continue dripping on everything and being essentially blinded by my hair soaking my glasses, I dried off and got out of my wet clothes before helping him.  

I wanted to get him to open up about whatever was on his mind, but having people waiting downstairs didn’t give me that chance.  Instead I just looked at his wounds, doing what I could.  They looked fine.  Once it became obvious that the towel could do nothing more for his hair, he gave up and set it down, just standing awkwardly still until I had his wounds cleaned and bandaged again.  The chest bandage covered so much of him that the tape to secure it wrapped partly around his sides and he obviously couldn’t bandage the back of his own head or else I suspect he would have suggested that he just do it on his own.  “Thanks.”  He still wasn’t meeting my gaze and his voice had a tension to it like a thread about to snap.  Something was definitely bothering him, something serious.  I couldn’t tell if it was the rain or something recent that had set him off or if he’d been like this all day; he’d been around my family in the morning and might have feigned happiness as a result, and then he’d been in a car, still with my family, so tension had been expected.  Now I saw no recognizable reason for his anxiety so I couldn’t be sure if he was bothered by the rain or his sister or something from last night.  

Rather than ask another futile question, I hugged him.  An odd shiver ran though his body though I don’t know if he was shaking due to emotion or just because he was damp, half nude, and standing in a relatively cold tile bathroom.  He hesitated before returning my hug.  With his chin on my shoulder (somehow, he had to stretch his neck a bit to even manage that and it wasn’t very comfortable for either of us) I felt him open his mouth and then close it again.  Whatever he’d been about to say, he’d decided against it.  Or else that was a very subtle yawn.  

Jack tended to be either very still or constantly in motion, but right now he managed to stand so perfectly motionless that it worried me a little.  He didn’t move a muscle for what must have been nearly five minutes.  I didn’t want to break the hug out of worry for him and whatever new emotional crisis he was going through.  Not that that made it less awkward for me.  I felt like I should say something and at the same time I was afraid that anything I could think to say might upset him.  I wasn’t sure what I could do that _wouldn’t_ upset him, actually, and standing there hugging him I became increasingly aware that I was naked and that the Red Death bathroom must have been around fifty degrees.  And my hair was still damp.  At least Jack had pants and bandages.  If this went on much longer, my shivering was going to defeat my fear that breaking the hug would upset him.  Jack certainly seemed like he needed some time to talk about whatever he was going through now, and with people waiting for us, now wasn’t the best time for him to break down, although I hoped that this wasn’t quite that bad.  

Luckily, we were interrupted by Gibson yelling up the stairs, “I’m not getting any younger, you know!”  Jack broke the hug as soon as he heard her and dressed in warm, dry clothes, those clothes being his plaid wool pajamas.  Well, I guess it was his house, and we weren’t being particularly formal.  Even if he’d thrown on a tux, I’m not sure I would have been willing to bother dressing up, myself.  I just threw on something equally warm.  I was more focused on not being cold and saving time, so that warm clothing turned out to be a relatively mis-matched mix of slacks, wool socks, and a particularly distinct Christmas sweater Daisy had given me years ago.  I didn’t wear it often and for good reason; aside from the typical holiday greeting and a dozen white snowflakes the sweater had seven heavily stylized but still recognizable helicopters, not the sight-seeing kind but clearly military, some with just enough detail to suggest missiles as if, in blatant defiance of Christmas tradition, the sweater told the story of a government official who, after one year too many getting coal had dispatched a swarm of Apaches to hunt down Chris Kringle.  It was certainly a conversation starting sweater.  

Jack, who had hesitated on the landing, either waiting for me or just trying to plan what to say, gave my sweater a curious frown before Gibson looked back up the stairs to call us again and we were seen.  “Well?  Come on down!”  

Gibson went back into the living room, no doubt expecting us to follow and Jack paused to give my sweater another look.  He said nothing but the ridiculous and clearly festive look of the thing provoked a half-hearted smile from him— much more than I had expected considering that something had him so upset.  Looking back down the stairs, he seemed to steel himself and followed Gibson.  I wasn’t sure if he was damming up whatever he was feeling or if his resolve came from having to deal with his sister.  She didn’t seem _bad_ , at least she certainly wasn’t as domineering as his mother, but the kid surely seemed precocious and I doubted he was in any kind of mood to deal with that.  

For that matter, I wasn’t sure he was in a mood to deal with anyone; he seemed at least as introverted as I was, and I know after having dealt with my family for a few days I wasn’t exactly eager to deal with people I didn’t know very well, and unlike Jack I wasn’t dealing with some sort of emotional trauma right now.  

*       *      *

They had the TV on when we got downstairs.  Rex had recognized dog people in my sister, Gibson, and Veronica and lay at their feet in front of the couch.  Someone had pulled over his cushion in that room and gotten him out of his cart.  Lying on the pillow with my sister scratching his ears, Gibson rubbing his belly, and Veronica scratching his back, the dog couldn’t have looked happier.  My sister and Gibson sat on the couch while Raul sat in the armchair I had yet to touch and Veronica had pulled the ottoman between the others and sat on that.  They’d probably all been on the couch when we’d arrived and rearranged so that Arcade and I would have a place to sit.  

I hesitated on the threshold, sensing Arcade standing at my side even though I didn’t turn my head to see him.  Raul and Veronica both looked like they had comments on how long we had taken to change, but my sister beat them to the punch in Gaelic.  Roughly, it translated as “I’m not sure if you took more time than I expected or much less.”  I’d caught her reading the books I’d written before and now I fully suspected that she’d capitalized on my absence to read them all.  I was never sure if she was really as perverted as she sometimes seemed or if she was only doing this to mess with me.  

Not for the first time, I really appreciated the poor lighting of my new home as it hid my blush from everyone who turned to me, expecting a translation.  I sighed, managing something that was almost a genuine smile thanks to her comment and Arcade’s sweater.  “It’s good to see you, sis.”  I sat beside her and expected Arcade to take the last open spot on the couch.  He didn’t.  

He paused in the doorway.  “Look, we didn’t really have dinner or anything, so I’d like to grab something from the kitchen and then I’ll be back.  Do you want anything?”  The comment was clearly addressed to everyone in the room, because he was trying to be a good host— something I’d stupidly forgotten about— but he looked at me when he asked.  

Gibson waved a “no thank you.”  “We had pizza just an hour ago.”  

Raul and my sister said the same in less words and I shook my head.  “I’m fine.”  

I guess Arcade saw through my content facade or else he was worried that I was anorexic— I wasn’t, not really anyway, but I sometimes got too depressed to care about food.  I pretended I didn’t see the flash of concern in his eyes and rather than open that particular can of worms right now, he shrugged and started towards the kitchen.  

Again, Veronica looked about to say something, but my sister, failing to notice her, remarked happily, “So, how was Thanksgiving?”  

I suspected that she was either partly hoping I would include intimate details or just hinting that she’d ask about those later, but I ignored her tone.  Mostly I was just trying not to think about what I knew I’d need to tell her or need to hide from her.  I couldn’t tell her what had happened to my mother until or unless I could actually face the truth myself, which I couldn’t.  This fact had me distracted and practically on edge.  My whole body was tense, even though I sat intentionally low in the seat to look relaxed.  

“It was good.”

I felt Mila, Gibson, Veronica, and Raul all watching me, waiting for me to elaborate, but I focused instead on the TV.  I didn’t have cable, but they’d hooked up a computer, probably my sister’s to watch what was probably a DVD.  The show was the Princess and the Frog.  I was glad that Mila hadn’t talked them into letting her watch one of my DVDs or something similarly rated.  

When it became clear that I wasn’t going to explain, Raul mused, “Wow, that was some real story-telling.  Almost feels like I was there.”

I looked away from the movie towards them.  I’d been feigning joy pretty well, I guess, but the facade must have wavered at that moment because their disappointment and sarcastic attitudes shifted abruptly to the walking-on-eggshells kindness I was more used to and I hated myself for that.  I would rather just be alone right now, or alone with Arcade, but turning them away would have seemed at best selfish or rude and at worst it would have been a dead giveaway of my emotional state.  Trying not to talk had turned out no better and I feared that talking, even focusing on the good points of the holiday, I would have inevitably spilled out all the emotions and traumas I’d been through recently.  I needed a psychiatrist, not a troupe of house guests.  

They seemed about to change the subject when Arcade returned, looking puzzled and failing to notice the mood as he was too occupied trying not to spill the slightly-too-full mug of tea he carried along with his bowl of cereal.  “You got groceries?”

This time the question was directed at everyone but me.  Ignoring the confusion of Veronica, Raul, and Gibson, Mila answered calmly, “Aye, my half-brother got a bunch of stuff for me the other day when I got here.”

Arcade paused, clearly more than a little puzzled.  

*       *       *

I admit I had a suspicion the first time she said that, but this was also Jack’s house, and for all I knew he might have a half-brother somewhere in the city whom he’d called to watch his sister.  Jack seemed only slightly surprised, but he said nothing.  I was about to ask when Gibson voiced my thoughts first.  “I didn’t know you had a half-brother!”

Mila nodded.  “I have two, I just hadn’t met this one until now.  He watched me for a while the first day I got here but he had something else to do, which was why he contacted you guys.”  She hadn’t lost her accent, but I was getting used to it.  By now I could understand her even when she spoke as quickly as she had right then.  It still took everyone a moment to process this revelation.  

Veronica frowned and Raul bluntly voiced her concern, “You mean that creepy guy?  He’s your half-brother?”  

Jack jumped in before Mila could explain and before I could ask as subtly as possible if this was Vulpes.  To my great surprise, he seemed glad for the change of subject.  Talking about Thanksgiving was completely off-limits, but he was more than happy to talk about the intimate details of his family.  Admittedly, I was glad there would be less opportunity to give away anything about my very cautious family and my own past, but it made me more worried that something seriously traumatizing had happened between him and Vulpes.  

“Yeah.  He and I are roughly the same age, he’s the kid I met in Siberia.”

I was the first to process what this meant, or what I initially presumed it meant.  “You said the mother of the kid in Siberia died in childbirth, so...his father married your mother after saving your lives?”  Vulpes was his step-brother?  I’d had my suspicions since we’d arrived and, looking at Mila, I knew they were related.  Her features were way too similar to the frumentarius’ for the resemblance to be coincidental.

Jack shook his head.  “My mother never married his father, I have no idea what happened to the man after that, but I ran into his son out here.  I didn’t recognize him at first.”  

And that son had then raped him.  Or raped him initially.  Normally, I wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this lunatic had crossed the line long ago.  At best, he might have raped Jack and then taken on this protective attitude once he recognized him, but I didn’t believe that.  The guy had stalked and raped Jack and he was going to keep doing that as well as who knew what else.  And Jack considered him a friend or at least didn’t want him dead, whether out of Stockholm Syndrome or through some misguided sense of brotherhood.  

As everyone pieced together the implications of that statement, Mila explained bluntly.  “Yeah, I’m sort of a bastard.”

Jack frowned at her.  “Is bastard really the right term?”  Completely ignoring the possibility that a ten-year-old might not be the right age to know, understand, or openly discuss this sort of thing, he jumped right to the diction she’d used.  I had the same question, to be honest, but it seemed just a little more concerning that the girl just blurted that out.  

She shrugged.  “Is there a feminine term for a child of a one-night stand?”

Apparently quite eager to chat about this subject, maybe because it avoided conversation about the past few days, Jack explained to the rest of us, “Mila figured out that we had different fathers a few years ago; I was open with her about it.”

“Mom was too, you know.  And you hadn’t known who it was, even though you were there.  I’m a little disappointed, bro.”  

Jack’s expression showed some kind of response to her statement, but his emotions were so mixed as to be unreadable.  When he hesitated, his sister continued.  

“I have brown eyes.  Mom and Jack’s dad have the recessive genes for blue eyes, although his dad’s were violet due to partial albinism.  If they had the dominant brown eye gene, they’d have had brown eyes instead.”  The girl stated this matter-of-factly.  For a ten-year-old, she was certainly precocious.  

What she said did make sense.  I found it more difficult to imagine that Jack had ever been so sheltered as to miss what had happened, or at least not to realize it until years later.  

And the kid was so calm and even cheery about this.  Maybe it was just me, but I felt like most people would be a bit more upset or at least awkward to admit that they were conceived in a one-night-stand.  Veronica apparently felt the same.  “You’re just a little ray of sunshine, ain’t ya?”

Mila shrugged.  “It’s the truth, I don’t see why I should be bothered by the circumstances of my birth.”  Something about the way she said a lot of this suggested that she was mimicking the word choice of someone else, maybe her mother or maybe just some author she liked, but it didn’t seem to be Jack, at least not from his writing.  

Apparently realizing that the rest of us felt a bit more awkward discussing her questionable parentage, she turned to Jack.  “So what happened since you got here?  It certainly seems like it’s been eventful.”  Here eyes flicked to his newly shortened hair, through which the scar on the back of his head remained a very visible jagged ridge.  

“Well...”  Jack explained, varying between his usual vivid storytelling and brief summaries of events he didn’t want to dwell on.  I guess it said a lot about his feelings which stories he told in detail and which he glossed over.  He went to great lengths describing the obvious good things: arriving in the city, meeting and getting to know various people, finding Rex.  Surprisingly, he gave the same full descriptions of the dangers he’d been through, from getting attacked by the bear to being mugged on his first day here, the latter story of course led straight into his account of meeting me.  That was a bit more unusual to hear.  I guess Jack was trying to keep me from feeling awkward, or he was feeling awkward himself, or else he was just fighting force of habit given the sort of things he usually wrote.  He told more than I’d expected about the two of us without going into intimate details.  Mostly he focused on the various instances I’d saved his life, which would have made me feel uncomfortable even if he hadn’t been alternating between downplaying our relationship and romanticizing it.  The former occasions typically followed the latter; he’d start going on as if writing a romance novel, then he’d realize how sappy it sounded, blush, and revert to downplaying everything at all romantic.  Actually, a lot of his better lines were almost Shakespearean I was torn between my awkwardness at hearing our relationship described like that and a strong inclination to be completely charmed by the obvious honesty of what he was saying.  He didn’t even mention the phone call from his mother.  That struck me as odd, he’d seemed happy about it, unsurprisingly, but I guess there was a lot of emotion he had yet to deal with, and he clearly didn’t want to get emotional right now, though whether that was due to the presence of his sister or just because he wasn’t nearly alone, I couldn’t be sure.  

*       *       *

When I’d finished my summary, I felt mortified.  First off, I’d left a lot of gaps my sister probably filled in with sex or masturbation because she knew me too well, I’d also vividly described so many close calls that, particularly given the morbid decor of my house, everyone here probably thought I either had a death wish or some sick obsession with my own mortality.  On top of that, I’d said nothing at all about Thanksgiving and my sappy descriptions of our love life had probably embarrassed Arcade, if not left him as awkward as I felt right now.  I’d also carefully avoided any mention of Vulpes, but only this last fact drew attention right away.  

Gibson and Raul frowned.  “You didn’t mention meeting your sister’s half-brother.”

It was Gibson who spoke, but Raul seemed to have the same question.  I ran my fingers over the back of my head, I had a habit of doing that when I felt awkward, but now my hand stopped at the ridge of stitches.  I found my fingers tracing the seam while I replied.  “Well, yes.  He...he showed up to talk to me about the gang that mugged me that first night, the Legion.”  

Gibson frowned a bit more curiously.  “I didn’t think the Legion usually robbed anyone— I thought they just enslaved or killed people, but I guess I don’t really know all that much about them...”

Veronica, who probably guessed what truth she didn’t know, gave me a look that no one else noticed.  Luckily she timed it so that Arcade had glanced away to eat and no one else saw her, although I still felt as if my heart had dropped out of my chest for a moment until I was sure he hadn’t seen.  It didn’t help that she knew I was with both of them.  I’d really have to be careful from her as well as Arcade.  I’d have to make sure that she couldn’t just tell him.  

With these thoughts on my mind, I was a bit surprised when my sister laughed and remarked, “Dogs, gangs, bears, automobiles, is there anything that hasn’t attacked you around here?”  

“Plants?” Veronica suggested, apparently trying to go with the most harmless thing she could think of.  

“Actually...”

*      *      *

For the next hour, Jack regaled us with the various times he’d nearly been killed by plants— from razor grass and getting stuck in brambles to nearly being killed when a sequoia had crashed through his hotel one very stormy night near Sacramento.  His mother, apparently, had jokingly called it the “Hurricane of the Redwoods.”  His sister added that descriptive side-note when Jack paused for breath and the remark, somewhat surprisingly, brought that hollow look back into his eyes.  

“I’m going to make tea.  Do you want tea?”  He looked mainly at his sister and I, but the offer was presumably open to everyone.  The offer was so abrupt we knew that something had upset him, but no one openly confronted him about that.  

His sister and I were the only ones who wanted tea, Veronica, Gibson, and Raul all politely asked if we had coffee.  Jack started to say that we didn’t, but was quickly corrected by his sister.  Apparently, that was another thing she’d gotten with Vulpes.  Expresso.  The ten-year-old drank expresso.  Luckily, she pointed out, “It’s much to late for expresso, in my opinion.  I’ll just take a nice herbal tea.”  The girl looked like an anachronistic schoolchild, thought like Jack, and spoke like a posh business executive, probably her mother.  I wasn’t sure if I liked her or feared the kind of mayhem she could cause.  She _was_ related to Vulpes as well as Jack’s family and Jack himself could cause enough problems by accident.  I didn’t want to find out if this girl took after both the vicious frumentarius and Jack’s domineering mother.  Just taking her order for tea, Jack clammed up, adopting an attitude reminiscent of a servant on one of those shows about Victorian households.  

I watched Jack go, but once he was in the kitchen, starting the kettle going and figuring out the coffeemaker, I turned back towards our guests to find myself locked in an uncannily intimidating brown-eyed gaze.  Mila got straight to the point, “Alright, what is it?  What’s got him so upset?”

I stared blankly.  For one, I had no idea, but more surprisingly, since I’d met Jack, hollow and pained looks seemed par for the course.  Right now he’d been acting impressively calm.  I mean, I knew something was off from having seen his reactions before he’d put up this veil of happy hospitality, but nothing I’d seen from him since we’d joined our guests had come off as a dead giveaway of whatever emotional turmoil he was going through.  Either he’d changed considerably since his sister had last seen him or I was missing something.  

Mila must have realized why I was confused.  Raul and Gibson at least looked just as puzzled.  I suppose Veronica was better at reading Jack.  Mila, who had leaned towards me to ask, probably trying to make sure Jack couldn’t hear her, lowered her voice slightly and explained.  “He’s really good at hiding it, he sort of sprawls out and tries to look relaxed, but if you look, he’s really still.  Like, he doesn’t move most of his body for hours at a time and it’s all tense and locked into place.  He’ll twitch his fingers and stuff, so you can tell he’s on edge.  And his jaw.  He chews his tongue or something when he’s not talking.”  She dropped the overly-mature mannerisms she’d been cultivating as if she hadn’t had time to rehearse this particular statement, or else she was just too worried about him to act grown-up.  

Now that she mentioned it, I realized that she was right.  I knew Jack’s tells from having seen him in cars: the way he locked into his seat, the constant movement of his jaw— he was chewing his tongue, or his lip, or something—, the way he set his hands on his knees and drummed his fingers.  He was still in a subtly restless way.  I just hadn’t realized that he could do that in such a sprawled posture.  In cars, he sat bolt upright.  I guess he had a lot of practice hiding his emotions.  

I shrugged an answer.  “I’m really not sure.”  I did have suspicions, but however casual her discussion of sex, there was no way I was going to admit to Jack’s ten-year-old sister that her brother had been raped, possibly more than once and that might be what had him so twitchy right now.  

Jack came back before we could talk more about him, to my relief.  He distributed the three mugs of tea and three coffees and set a bowl of his thawed frozen succotash on the table, which he glanced at as if he wasn’t sure he wanted it now that he’d gotten it.  Looking at him more carefully, I knew his sister was right.  It helped that he couldn’t lounge as casually with a mug of hot tea in his hand; he sat straighter in the seat and I could see his muscles tense under the dark wool of his pajamas.  He looked almost braced against the black leather.  Between sips of his tea, his jaw twitched subtly and the hand resting on his right knee drummed a constant and rapid rhythm against the plaid.  His breathing was almost so shallow that I thought he might pass out until the chamomile of his tea calmed his nerves a bit.  He didn’t relax completely, he just got a little less twitchy.  He still seemed like a startled deer— currently motionless, but ready to run at break-neck pace into any danger that looked like an escape.  

He rejoined the conversation in his usual tone of well-feigned happiness.  He had a _lot_ of practice hiding his troubles.  It sounded like he’d gladly keep talking until dawn, but by now we all knew otherwise, and Gibson was the first to respond to that.  She finished her coffee quickly and stood.  “Well, it’s getting late and the shop will still have to open bright and early tomorrow— we all know Garrett will probably want another oil change.”  

Everyone who knew Garrett at all grinned at this statement and so did Jack, although whether he knew or was just playing along, I had no idea.  Raul and Veronica downed the last of their coffee and joined her.  “It’s been great to meet you, Mila,” Veronica stooped, probably intending to hug the girl but was inadvertently preempted by a handshake.  Jack’s sister must have witnessed a few too many business deals and too few friendly social events.  The female mechanic changed tacts flawlessly.  

Everyone said farewell to Rex as well and the old dog, probably grateful to be home and exhausted from the tip, wagged his tail but didn’t try to stand.  He was back asleep before they were out the door.  Knowing how Henry kept his lab and how rarely he left it, I doubted Rex had gotten much sleep after the surgery.  

Once they were gone, it was just me, Jack, and Mila.  Jack sighed when the door shut.  For a moment, Mila and I both watched him, expecting one of his usual abrupt explanations, but he didn’t seem to notice.  He gave his bowl of succotash a long, blank stare, letting his fake smile slump away before resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward to study it more closely.  

“Are you gonna eat or do you want to paint it?” Mila remarked, jumping back to her less formal and less Jack-like diction.  He looked at her wordlessly.  Feeling awkward just watching this exchange, I started to gather the empty mugs and just generally tidy things up a bit.  It felt like I was actually being productive this way and I needed that until I could figure out what I could do to help Jack if he didn’t want to talk about it.  I mean, I was here for him, as...pretty much as always, I guess, but there wasn’t anything I could actually do to help until he let me, and in the interim I just felt...useless.  Feeling useless had always bothered me.  

I hadn’t gotten more than two mugs when Jack started talking.  “There’s...  I...”  He hesitated, sighed, and stood, giving up on whatever he’d been trying to say.  “I need to paint.”

He went upstairs and I fully expected him to stay up there.  This being Jack, and him being so traumatized and awkward, I didn’t have much faith that whatever hospitality had once been drilled into him would actually make him good at hosting guests.  

But I was incredibly inexperienced at dealing with children, even oddly mature Scottish ten-year-olds.  I looked at Mila, unsure what to say.  

Her gaze shifted from my face to my sweater.  “Are those Apache helicopters?”


	32. Secrets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, I've been incredibly busy lately. Also, I will hopefully be posting a new series soon in a different fandom. In the future, I'll probably switch between these three fandoms based on which genre I feel like writing in at the time, so it may be a while between updates.

I froze.  On one hand, I wanted to tell Jack the truth, so lying to his sister might not be the best choice, and I was a terrible liar, on the other, there was no way I was telling the truth to a child I barely knew.  Rather than jump to sarcasm, I went with curiosity instead.  I answered with a question.  “You know what an Apache helicopter is?”  I mean, the girl clearly got into Jack’s possessions, given her uncomfortable focus on sex, it was entirely possible that she also got her hands on war movies or similar media where she might have learned the military model.  It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the girl, who had likely read at least one of Jack’s books, had also watched Platoon and Saving Private Ryan.  Although I did find it a bit odd given that Jack’s traumas suggested he probably wouldn’t own such violent movies.  Or maybe he was only bothered by more specific things.  

Mila nodded and smiled.  “Yeah, I got to see the engines of one once, I think it’s about the largest engine Rolls Royce makes!”  

Having heard Daisy recount the specs of Apaches in her usual avionic nostalgia, that statement confused me.  “Are you sure they use Rolls Royce engines?  I’d thought they were GE.”  

Mila shook her head happily.  “Well, American Apaches use a General Electric engine, but British ones are powered by Rolls Royce.  I’ve never seen an American Apache.  Do you have access to one?”

I paled.  “Uh, no, of course not.  Those are military helicopters.”

“Then you’re, like, an aircraft buff or something?”

...crap.  There wasn’t a good way I could weasel out of this, and she seemed pretty clever.  I tried my previous tactic again, just hoping I could get her to change the subject.  “How do _you_ know so much about Apache helicopters?”

She was still smiling.  “Oh, mom took me with her to some kind of military base once, outside of London.  I got to look at the helicopters and this nice engineer kept me occupied while she worked.  She’s been talking to them about equipping military helicopters with these really cool...”  She trailed off abruptly, her face going blank like she’d let something slip.  “Uh ...never mind.”

Jack returned during our awkward silence.  He didn’t seem to notice us.  His pajama sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his eyes quickly scanned the room, lighting on a neat pile of wool blankets and pillows in one corner.  They had clearly been moved there to be out of the way.  He glanced at us a split second after I saw where he’d been looking and apparently something about us amused him enough that a hint of a genuine smile broke his almost grim stare.  

*       *       *

As usual, running over my mental to-do-list, I’d heard nothing they’d been saying, but when I arrived in the living room, I found my sister silent and Arcade staring at her curiously, his head tilted to the side and the effect of that adorable expression compounded by the ridiculous sweater.  I felt a smile creep onto my face, despite my multitude of darker emotions.  The sweater also reminded me to turn the thermostat up and I went to do that as I remarked, “I’d been wondering where my extra bedding had absconded to.  Mila, are you comfortable on the couch?”

She nodded.  “Course, I’ve been sleeping on the couch every night since I got here.  It’s not an airline seat.”  She had a point.  

I wanted to go upstairs, to get on with the painting I had been planning to start, but I felt I needed to stay and be a decent host, and I also wanted to be sure Arcade didn’t want to have tea or something.  Oh, right.  I still had food.  

*       *       *

Jack stood awkwardly, shifting from leg to leg before lunging forward to grab his succotash.  He carried the bowl back to the doorway; I thought he was going back upstairs until he turned on his heel to face us.  “Are either of you...can I go paint?  Do you need anything?”  The latter remark was directed solely at his sister.  The little girl shook her head and started arranging the blankets and pillows on the couch.  

“Dinnae fesh yerself, I’m good.  I was up late last night playing Silent Hill.  I’m tired now.”

Jack stared.  “You played my horror games?”  

She nodded.  “What?  Not like they’d give me nightmares or anything.”

I really didn’t know the game and, even though I’d only known her for a short time, after everything she’d already mentioned, the girl could hardly surprise me now.  Jack apparently felt the same, or else he just conceded that horror games were better than any manner of other things his sister could have gotten into.  He shrugged and looked expectantly at me.  

I guess he wanted an answer?  

“Jack, I’ve been living here for months now, you can feel free to paint.”

*       *       *

He had a point.  With my sister seemingly settling in for the night, I went to my studio and got started.  By the time Arcade came up to unpack three minutes later, I already had the underpainting done and my pallet completely laid out.  

*       *       *

I hadn’t spent much time watching Jack paint, mostly because he tended to work while I was asleep or at the hospital.  Unpacking the suitcase didn’t take that long and after that, I found myself watching him paint while I debated how to ask the question that was on my mind.  

He painted the whole canvas black, which seemed to be something he usually did as most of his paintings looked very dark even after he finished them, but from there, instead of covering it with a landscape or stonework, he added a sketch so dark I couldn’t see it at all and started work on some kind of background.  I’d been standing by the bed, but curiosity drew me closer.  

The few times I’d seen Jack painting before, he’d worked slowly, every stroke calculated and careful, but I’d also only watched him a few times, and once he’d just been editing an old painting.  Right now, his brush lay down color so fast that even the lightest strokes weren’t dry by the next time he touched them.  Once I stood beside him, I noticed that, and saw the reference pictures he had spread out beside his pallet.  Whales.  Given that context, the weird background of blue dabs resolved itself as a deep ocean.  He was painting the whale swimming up towards the viewer in such intense perspective that it seemed truly gigantic.  With Jack painting so quickly, the animal itself took shape soon enough; steely grey skin etched with scars, tiny, incredibly zoetic eyes, and three harpoons trailing faint clouds of red solidified the whale as a truly epic living tank.  I also got the sense that this was another one of Jack’s more personal paintings, and that distracted me from my original question even before he added the teeth.  He completed the body before he started on them.  I had an impression of this whale as some kind of almost heroic effigy before he added a mouthful of the most disturbingly detailed disproportionate fangs.  

“...Moby Dick?”

He smiled a little at the reference and shook his head.  “No, but the darkness of the background does suggest that it’s only grey to show lighting.  It’s a prehistoric species, called `Leviathan’, technically `Levyatan.’  `Progenitor of whales,’ as I like to think of it.  The harpoons just sort of...worked.”  I’d been meaning to ask him if this painting had personal meaning, but when he mentioned the harpoons, he got that hollow look again and I knew it was personal almost as much as I knew that he didn’t want to talk about it right now.  I changed topics, still wondering who this whale represented.  I had a guess already, just from how powerful and intimidating it seemed.  I hoped my guess was wrong given that he didn’t want to talk about it and my question was sort of in the same vein.  

I waited until one of the very brief moments that his brush was not touching the canvas to ask.  “Jack...  So, we’re heading to Scotland in two days— I can take the time off, that’s not a problem, I was just wondering... you said you had legal stuff to take care of, but is that it?  I mean, is there any chance that we’ll be dealing with your mother?”  I mostly wanted to know because, given what I already knew of her, I wanted to make sure I had some warning, as much because I wanted to avoid starting a fight as because I was afraid that an apparently intelligent woman with government contacts might figure out why I was so guarded about my past.  

Jack let the brush finish it’s downward motion as if he’d briefly lost control of his arm.  A faint trail of silver highlighted the massive belly of the leviathan as he let his hand fall before he replied.  “No.”  

Now I had the sinking feeling that I’d been right and I knew for a fact that any further questions would get me nowhere.  “...Okay.”  Feeling like I’d broken him a little in my blundering conversation, I retreated back to the bedroom, hoping to give him space until it was safe to actually ask him about whatever had him so fragile right now.  

I guess he felt bad for being so sensitive.  “Sorry.”  He didn’t turn around, but I did, pausing in the curtained threshold to see Jack, frozen in place, one arm still letting his brush rest against the canvas.  “I just...this is recent.  More recent.  I’ll talk about it when I can, I just...need time.”  He hesitated, idly cleaned his brush and made another, much slower, stroke before adding, “I’d like to leave fairly early on Sunday morning, if you’re alright with that.  Are you still on good terms with Teagan, because it would probably be best to travel with him so he can watch my sister?”

Yet another question I had never expected from him.  “Yeah.  I don’t really keep in touch with him, but we don’t hate each other.”  The idea of going somewhere with both Jack and Teagan was significantly more awkward now that it might become a reality, especially if his sister came along for the ride.  Somehow my life had never been this eventful before, which was really saying something.  The idea of actually leaving the country for the first time in my life didn’t even occur to me right now.  

Jack nodded, still acting as if he barely heard me.  “Good.  I’ll call him about this.  Do you work tomorrow?”

That made me grimace more readily than the situation he’d just planned.  “Yeah, the usual shift.”  Overnight at the hospital, of course.  Having just had nearly a week of vacation, going back to work was never fun, and there was a full moon tomorrow.  Things were always crazy under full moons.  

Jack seemed to consider something.  “Do you sleep well on planes?”

I started to say I’d never been on a plane, but that wasn’t entirely accurate.  I had never been on a commercial jet; I’d been on military planes, they just weren’t really designed for comfort or sleep.  “Um, I haven’t really tried?”

“Would you be alright leaving pretty much right after you get back from work?”

“I can deal with that, sure.”  

*       *      *

Between planning out how to do everything I’d need to get done in the next several days and considering the more technical aspects of my painting— mostly making sure perspective worked right and the huge whale body didn’t develop any spots that were too light or too dark— I had plenty to distract myself from the real issue nagging at the back of my mind.  Or any of the real issues.  Mostly, I didn’t want to think about the fact that I would, sooner rather than later, inevitably _need_ to tell my sister that our mother was dead.  There.  I said it, at least in my mind.  That was the first step, wasn’t it?  Or maybe the last.  I don’t know, I’d never been good with grieving.  My whole life was a testament to that.  

By now the whale was nearly finished and I paused, meaning to look at it for any mistakes I’d missed up close, but getting distracted.  The city out the open windows of my studio was beautiful.  I had the lights dimmed, mostly to let Arcade sleep if he wanted to, so the glare was minimal and I could see the whole gorgeous skyline.  The smoker was outside again next door, obnoxiously checkered suit barely visible in the moonlight.  I felt like he’d finally given up watching his weird gay neighbor who paints at all hours of the night.  

I heard Arcade get up somewhere behind me.  “Jack, it’s five in the morning, are you ever going to sleep?”

“I’ll sleep eventually.”

“Yeah, when you pass out from exhaustion.”  

“We slept in yesterday.  At any rate, I need to finish this.  I won’t be able to sleep if I leave it now.”  He walked over to me.  I thought he was just going to look at the painting, but he hugged me, catching me more off-guard than I expected.  I flinched before I could fight down my anxiety.  The painting was helping, but I was still upset and right now that made me high-strung.  

As a result, I practically had a heart attack two minutes later when there was a loud thud somewhere in the house.  To my credit, Arcade also jumped a split second before he let go of me and I knew one of his hands had drawn his pistol.  

“...Jack?  Was that you?”  It was Mila, calling from downstairs, confirming that she wasn’t the culprit.

*       *       *

Jack was at the stairs before I registered that he’d even moved.  I hadn’t really seen him run before, not counting the split second glimpse before I hit him with my car.  I mean, having felt his legs, I’d figured he could run pretty quickly if he had to, but either I was a lot more tired than I thought or Jack was less faster-than-average and more like professional sprinter in terms of speed.  And he was running straight towards the mysterious sound that probably meant somebody had broken in yet again.  

I followed him as quickly as I could, but he was out of my sight already.  Mila had turned the lights off downstairs, probably because she’d been planning to sleep, and although I sort of knew the layout of the house, the dark still made things difficult, and with so few windows it really was _dark_.  

“Jack?” The girl’s voice had a slight note of panic, less than I’d expect if, say, she suddenly found a gun-toting home invader, but I wouldn’t put it past her.  

Jack was apparently in the hallway and I heard him rush towards her as he called back, “Mila?  Are you alright?”  

This was Jack in the closest I had yet seen him to a combat situation and it was more than a little disorienting to hear the man I’d seen so emotionally vulnerable sounding so calm and focused when there could well be a gunfight in the next few seconds and he was unarmed.  At least, as far as I knew he was unarmed.  He didn’t seem like he knew how to fight, I still felt he’d just gotten lucky hearing about how he’d fended off those Legion thugs on his first day here.  And I really didn’t expect the emotionally fragile artist to have any deadly weapons stashed in case of emergency.  

There was a thud somewhere in the living room and Mila let out a very quiet startled squeak.  There was another sound I couldn’t place and that was it.  There was no way this was happening in the dark.  I turned on the lights.  

The noise I’d heard had apparently been Jack tripping over the coffee table, the lights came on to reveal him standing beside Mila, rubbing his knee.  His sister wasn’t hurt, just startled and the reason was obvious.  Both of them were staring with varying degrees of confusion, surprise, and concern, at the man lying unconscious on the rug.  Recognizing him, as both of them probably did, I found I was less concerned than annoyed.  It was Vulpes Inculta.  

Jack crouched beside him as soon as he realized what must have happened.  I really hoped his was dead when Jack checked his pulse.  

“Fuck, he’s burning up, what’s wrong with him?”  I knew Jack wasn’t that skilled with human medicine and the way he looked at me, he clearly hoped I’d help him.  Shit.  If Jack was just a little more emotionally stable, the legionary would already be dead, but knowing how fragile Jack was, I couldn’t just let him die.  I wasn’t sure I could just let him die under any circumstances, but so help me, Vulpes was really testing my limits.  

I went to help him.  Jack hadn’t been exaggerating; I could feel his fever from a foot away.  In the narrow space between the table and the television, Jack hovered awkwardly close, obviously wanting to help but not sure what to do and it just made it difficult to think with him looming over me like that.  

“Jack, my first aid kit’s that tackle box in the closet, go get it, please?”  Once again, the man was off before I fully registered that he’d moved.  For someone as clumsy as he was, I felt less surprised by his injuries now that I’d seen how quickly he moved when he wasn’t drugged during an emergency.  

Mila kept her distance, apparently trying to stay out of our way; she seemed perfectly calm with the idea that her half-brother had broken in and then collapsed with a high fever.  In fact, the girl looked utterly fascinated.  As much as I didn’t like the idea of having a ten-year-old assist in this, I needed all the help I could get if Vulpes was going to survive.  With a fever this high, his odds were slim even if this had been a fully-staffed hospital and I’d been a doctor without the potential of future annoyance riding on his survival.  I knew I’d regret saving his life, I just wish I knew for certain that I would regret saving him more than letting him die.  

Jack returned with the first aid kit while I rolled Vulpes onto his back.  Having an unconscious patient was more problematic than I’d expected— I usually knew at least some hint of symptoms or a medical history before I saw my patients, but right now a fever was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.  It could be anything from meningitis to malaria, or something as simple as an infected cuticle.  I had no way of asking him about it unless he— 

As I was thinking it, and to my great surprise, he woke up.  

“Vulpes!”  Jack was practically in a panic, so much so that I stared at him, dumbfounded by the sheer level of his concern before I came back to my senses with the certainty that I’d need to work quickly if there was any chance of saving the stubbornly conscious pain-in-the-ass.  

Evidently, or perhaps luckily, people with fevers over a hundred, even ones who should by most logic, be unconscious, don’t exactly have the ability to think clearly.  Whether by pain or fever, Vulpes clearly had no idea where he was, leaving him just as useless diagnostically.  Speaking in the fastest, most-slurred Latin I’d ever heard, Vulpes let out a stream of garbled profanity and insults.  I got the vaguest sense that he was referring to me, for some reason, due to the repeated mention of doctors.  I’m glad I made such a strong impression.  

“Oh, I hate you too, believe me.”  Luckily, Jack didn’t hear my muttered retort and neither did the frantic Scotsman understand the legionary’s snarled tirade.  Jack was currently adding his own unintelligible commentary in what might have been Gaelic.  

I held a thermometer in the frumentarius’ ear while I scanned his body for any obvious signs of infection.  I’m really not sure what I would have done if I hadn’t seen anything, beyond just loading him with antibiotics and hoping for the best.  The thermometer beeped before I saw it.  One-hundred and six.  This would be a closer call than I’d expected, assuming he somehow managed to live.  He was a stubborn asshole, I fully expected he’d survive just to spite me.  

There was a notable bulge on his side, where he’d been shot over a month ago, but it wasn’t just bandages.  Pulling up his shirt, I saw the tell-tale black soaking the cloth.  Once I had the wound exposed, the smell of gangrene was unmistakable.  I’m pretty sure my own brief bout of swearing managed to surprise Jack.  It was going to be a hell of a night.  

 


	33. Homecoming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Traveling and marveling at Jack's family failing to understand need to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Titled for the song by Green Day.   
> A bit of a slow, short chapter, I guess. I'm getting to Mila finding out her mother is dead soon and I'm still trying to figure out how to do that. I might get it over with early in the next chapter as a result, but otherwise prepare for a whole lot of description of everything.

*       *       *

Vulpes was finally stabilized around eight in the morning, at which point Arcade summarized what I’d need to watch for and went to sleep.  The worst was over, or at least the wound had been cleaned and the fever was down to a more reasonable ninety-nine degrees and slowly falling.  Arcade had prescription-strength medicines in his first aid kit along with less potent equivalents, which I didn’t think was legal but I didn’t want to ask.  It saved Vulpes’ life as surely as cleaning out the wound, but I didn’t find that out until later.  Arcade had given him basic antibiotics after stitching up the gunshot and operating under the assumption that Vulpes had been taking those, he had to assume this infection was something resistant.  The higher doses of more powerful antibiotics seemed to be helping already and the morphine we had him on would probably keep him knocked out for the rest of the day.  As long as he didn’t tear the stitches, move around, or stop taking the antibiotics too soon, he should be fine.  I took comfort in that.  I really didn’t need to lose anyone else right now.  

Mila had gone to sleep a few hours ago and would be waking up soon.  I wanted her to enjoy today.  I wasn’t my mother, but hopefully I had learned a thing or two about traveling with a kid.  Taking her back home, I needed the time to figure out how to tell her about our mother and hopefully come to terms with that myself.  Hopefully.  My uncle could handle her, I’d already called him and aside from a good bit of surprise hearing that I was with Arcade and just getting the call from me in general, he’d agreed to join us.  That was good, I didn’t have enough control over my own life to manage my sister and I couldn’t sort out my emotions and be social at the same time.  My sister and my uncle both knew I needed time alone, especially when there was something on my mind, as there certainly was right now.  I’d make sure Mila had a book and the supervision of my uncle while we traveled and I could deal with my emotions then, right now, or, more accurately, once she woke up, I wanted her to really enjoy some time in the city.  Initially, I’d been thinking of running around town and being the tourist I hadn’t bothered to be three months ago, but needing to check on Vulpes kinda threw a wrench into that plan, so I’d come up with the alternative of playing co-op games.  Co-op games and maybe board games that were more appropriate for a ten-year-old, anyway.  Vulpes might let her play God of War for all I knew, when I was watching her we’d be less in the range of Call of Duty and closer to Mario Kart.  

Around noon I sat back and stared at the finished painting.  The leviathan surged towards the viewer, its hide steely grey and scarred and bleeding.  It looked unstoppable and yet it had been stopped.  I don’t know how long I just sat and stared at those painted eyes before something stirred in the silent house.  

Arcade and Mila were still asleep and Vulpes, laid on a blanket on one of my painting tables, was unconscious, but I heard a door creak open.  I couldn’t move silently to save my life, not on this hard wood floor, but I stood up.  The sound had come from the bedroom, probably from the door to the stairs.  After a brief moment of silence, a familiar face poked past the curtain.  

“Alerio?” I whispered.  

He’d stayed back, keeping his face in shadow, but I was uncannily good at recognizing people, and between the fact that Vulpes was here and only the Legion seemed to break into my house on a regular basis, he was the only person who made sense.  He looked surprised, but said nothing, carefully shifting around the curtain and walking over to me.  His eyes scrutinized Vulpes for a moment, making sure the man was still alive.  

Alerio addressed me in a whisper, following my lead.  “What happened?  Will he recover?”

I nodded.  “He had an infected wound.  He collapsed, but he’s being treated.  Are you here looking for him?”

He nodded.  “No one knows where he is, I came here because it seemed like the only possibility left.  When will he recover?”

“He’ll need a few days of rest for the wound to heal enough that it won’t reopen and to clear the infection out of his system.  His fever nearly killed him.”  Admitting that was easier; Vulpes was still alive, mostly thanks to Arcade.  I felt a surge of affection for the doctor even more than normal.  As much as I found Vulpes’ uncharacteristic vulnerability attractive, he was still unconscious, and I wasn’t even going to try getting him on a plane.  

Alerio considered his boss, looking worried.  “You’re sure he’ll recover?  If he’s going to be incapacitated for a few days, he’ll need to be protected.  I should stay.”

Actually, that was a brilliant idea.  “Yeah.  He probably has a lot of enemies.  At least no one else knows he’s here.  Keep him safe.”  With my painting finished and my sister leaving America tomorrow, I wanted to spend today with her, being tourists, belatedly in my case, and I trusted Alerio with Vulpes’ life if not my own.  I gave him the run-down of medical things to do and watch for and went downstairs.  I left a note in the bedroom for Arcade, just so he wouldn’t shoot the guy or something.  

*       *       *

My alarm clock woke me up at four.  I found a note on top of the clock when I turned off the alarm.  In barely intelligible chicken-scratch, Jack had let me know that another legionary had come looking for Vulpes, a guy whom Jack already knew, and he’d given the guy instructions and left him guarding the unconscious pain-in-the-ass.  Brilliant, Jack.  Your caution never ceases to amaze me.  And he knew this guard as well.  Exactly how many legionaries was my boyfriend casually friendly with?  My instincts made me worry, but this was Jack, he had all the menace of a labrador.  I steered clear of the Legion congregating in the studio, got breakfast, and headed to work.  

I didn’t expect a good day after having spent half the night stabilizing a man with gangrene in his abdomen, but things managed to be fairly slow for a change.  Despite the full moon, there were amazingly few emergencies.  It was really a good thing, but the pessimist in me suspected this good fortune somehow foretold redoubled terrorist efforts in the rest of the month.  I tried not to believe that little voice.  

At the very least, even the easy night at work still meant that I was fairly tired when I got back to the house I shared with Jack.  I hadn’t really known what to expect when he said we’d be going to Scotland when I got home.  I had taken care of everything I really could, having basically repacked my suitcase for this trip last night and Johnson had managed to get me a convincing passport, so hopefully that would work.  I couldn’t risk bringing my gun, which would make this the only time I’d been unarmed in a very long while.  I sure hoped I didn’t end up needing it, but having Vulpes unconscious upstairs with a deep wound in his side helped assuage those fears.  

I’d also prepared for the possibility that Teagan would already be there and run through a few ways to avoid that awkwardness as much as possible.  Teagan wasn’t there.  When I got home, Jack and Mila were ready to go, shoes on and suitcases by the door while they played chess together.  Considering we were traveling with a ten-year-old, it seemed incredible that we got the car packed and headed out in less than fifteen minutes, but I guess Jack and Mila were both used to this from the sound of their travels with their mother.  

“The flight leaves from Oakland,” Jack explained, “It’s five hours give-or-take to Newark and then there’s the long red-eye to London.  I’d suggested just having Vance pick us up, but Teagan pointed out that with all of us, it would be better to rent an SUV.  I was thinking we could pick up my uncle and then head to the airport?”  

I nodded.  “That sounds good.”  I still wasn’t exactly looking forward to the awkwardness of traveling with Jack and my ex, but I was doing this for him.  

Despite his wealthy family and the fact that he’d worked most of his life flying one kind of plane or another, Teagan had always been very cheap.  When we’d broken up, it hadn’t surprised me to learn that he’d bought a tiny little house in one of the bad parts of Oakland.  Luckily, I guess, it was also pretty close to the airport.  Outside the house only looked occupied because the lights were on, there was nothing remotely distinct about the dying lawn or the cement porch.  Inside, he’d probably filled the place with pictures he’d taken and odd souvenirs he’d picked up in his travels.  When I said souvenirs, I didn’t mean little snow globes or plastic figurines, his idea of souvenirs tended more towards authentic didgeridoos, Russian nesting dolls, and the taxidermy head of a lion he’d once hunted.  

By the time we got to Tea’s house, Mila had to pee, so we stopped there for a few minutes while she used the bathroom and we loaded his suitcase into the car.  I don’t think Jack had slept since we’d left Johnson’s Hummer, but after we’d loaded up the car this morning he’d crashed.  He didn’t seem to wake up when we stopped, and I wasn’t sure if that made things more or less awkward.  Mila took charge now that her brother was unable to manage things, and the girl matter-of-factly left the car before I’d had a chance to suggest that she use her uncle’s bathroom.  She’d gone to the door, greeted him, and was already inside before I walked up to the nondescript porch.  

Teagan looked like he never aged.  I didn’t find most bald men very attractive— I hadn’t dated any aside from Teagan— but, for some reason, I couldn’t imagine the forty-year-old Scotsman with hair.  He’d gone bald, and grey, early in life and I’d only seen one picture of him before then.  As a teenager, he’d been even more gangly-looking than I had with a wild mop of windswept hair so violently orange that it looked like a wig.  It had looked more like a wig because I was used to him looking as he did now. For at least ten years Teagan had been a lean, tanned, bald man with brilliantly blue eyes and the kind of naturally smooth skin that left his age indeterminate.  He stood slightly taller than me, presumably he always had; even in the picture from before he’d lost his hair, he must have been over six feet tall.  He wasn’t unattractive.  I mean, I’d dated the guy, but I didn’t feel like my standards focused on looks, Jack and, to a lesser degree, Teagan, had sort of been the exceptions to that, although they had other qualities I liked more than their looks.  Jack more-so than Teagan, whatever his age.  

Most bald men tried comb-overs or otherwise tried to emphasize the hair that they had.  Teagan, on the other hand, looked like he shaved his head at first glance.  He looked like he shaved everything, actually.  And he might have.  The guy seemed to have almost no body hair at all, what little there was on his arms and chest grew so fine and sparse that it wasn’t noticeable until you looked for it.  The only hair he had (a fringe on the back of his head and his pubic hair) had turned a shade of grey that camouflaged perfectly with his skin tone.  Fine, flat, and kept neatly trimmed, it became all but invisible.  Being bald suited him, and what little hair he had more closely resembled a silver laurel wreath than any number of less flattering looks.  

“Good to see you,” Tea greeted me.  

“Um, yeah, good to see you too.”  

He nodded at Jack in the car.  “He hasn’t been sleeping, has he?”

“Well last night was a bit...yeah.”

Tea nodded and brought his suitcase out to the car.  “That’s Jack.”  He watched his nephew for a moment, noticing the scars, I assumed.  “Is he alright?”

“Well, I, um, I kind of hit him with my car, but yeah, he’s recovered now.”

Teagan shook his head.  “I meant emotionally, although that sounds like Jack as well.”

“He’s...” I watched Jack, trying to judge if he’d just been tired or hiding it or if painting and spending time with his sister had actually helped him.  “He’s been painting, so I guess he’s better than he was?”

Mila skipped back to the car, closing the door behind her.  I guess Teagan had already locked it although I hadn’t noticed.  “Okay, let’s go.”  Apparently she was in a very good mood, or else she’d just dropped her extra-mature facade for some reason.  

I closed the trunk as Mila got into the car and Teagan gave me a curious frown that seemed to mean something.  I raised an eyebrow, but he shook his head, probably because the ten-year-old would be getting impatient and we might run into traffic.  

We didn’t run into traffic but having had no experience with airports, the two hour wait at security as well as all the other long lines were practically painful.  We still reached the gate with two hours to spare, apparently because Jack had learned to expect delays in plane travel and booked a fairly late flight.  I also discovered that we’d be flying first class, which I really hadn’t expected, although considering the money Jack had I felt like I should have.  I’d just figured he wouldn’t book first class tickets because this was Jack, who slept in cars, ate frozen food, and generally didn’t complain about anything.  He didn’t seem high-maintenance, but I guess he still liked his creature comforts when he was paying for them.  

As this was Jack and he couldn’t sit still for two minutes, he’d brought a sketchpad and Mila had a book.  The Bourne Ultimatum.  Somehow, I hadn’t expected her to be reading something normal like Harry Potter.  At least it wasn’t one of Jack’s books.  They still decided to get something to eat and buy other food to take on the plane, so I was left with Teagan as the two of us had packed our own meals and just needed bottled water.  

“You’re alright with me dating your nephew?”  Knowing him, I didn’t expect him to care, or I might have called him sooner to let him know.  

To my surprise he hesitated.  “Well...he _is_ much younger than you.”

It wasn’t an insult.  Actually, it was as close as the man would ever come to a warning.  I was surprised.  For one thing, I knew Teagan.  He felt that people had a right to make mistakes, even lethal, irreversible ones.  If his best friend had been suicidal, he wouldn’t have tried to talk the man out of it and might even be willing to provide the gun.  The way Teagan saw it, these choices were none of his business.  It was the reason he was a pilot and not a doctor.  It was also a good part of why we’d broken up and it drove me crazy how he could so completely disconnect with the emotional effect these choices might have.  Luckily, I guess, Teagan hadn’t made many moral decisions in his life.  

I was also amazed that he’d cared enough to warn me.  I knew that we didn’t hate each other or anything, we still cared about each other, just in a completely platonic way.  He was genuinely concerned that Jack’s age was a serious obstacle— and it could have been, it might still be, but I didn’t believe that it would really impede us.  Jack and I could relate to each other just fine despite that.  

“He’s doing much better than I thought, after this most recent tragedy in his life.”  

I tilted my head.  “Meaning his ex?”

Teagan frowned and shook his head.  “No, his mother, hasn’t he told you?”

“About how she basically threw him out?”  I didn’t bother to hide how much that still pissed me off.  

Again, he shook his head.  “Arcade, Jack’s mother is dead.”  

I stared and he explained, “It happened about a month ago, her plane was shot down.  I’m not too surprised he didn’t say anything, he’s probably had trouble dealing with it, but I really thought you knew.”  Jack and Mila were coming back and we both looked at them.  “Mila probably doesn’t know.”

I barely managed not to openly gape at him.  Really?  Jack hadn’t told me his mother was dead, but he also hadn’t told his _sister_ , who was still a kid, and we were probably going to find that out pretty obviously once we showed up _where she lived_ and found out _she was dead_.  He was bringing a ten-year-old into this with no warning?  I tried not to judge him to harshly, this was Jack, he’d already been through a hell of a lot and for all I knew he might be in denial or something, but for Mila’s sake, if he knew what had happened, if he was really fully aware of this, he had damn well better tell her so she didn’t find out in some horrible way I couldn’t fully imagine.  I couldn’t remember when I’d heard about my father’s death, but I can’t imagine it was going to be easy for her, at that age.  And _Teagan_ hadn’t even let her know?  This family!

Oh, they were all going to drive me crazy.  Didn’t anyone ever tell each other anything?  Even the important stuff?!  _Jeez_.  

Jack and Mila returned, eating their breakfast, or dinner, or lunch, or whatever meal this was, and Jack clearly picked up on something about our conversation.  He gnawed his sandwich.  “You two okay?”

“Yeah,” I sighed, rubbing my temples, “just marveling at how dyfunctional your family is.”  I added the last part under my breath and he didn’t quite hear it.  

“What?”

“Nothing.”

A barely understandable voice came over the loudspeakers, “Flight 117, non-stop service to Newark now boarding.”

Jack smiled.  “That’s us.”

Having so recently ridden in a car for the long drive to Tahoe, the long flights didn’t really bother me.  I slept most of the way and dinner at Newark was uneventful beyond finding out that Teagan no longer had six iguanas.  Five had died and he’d sold one to a breeder.  

*       *       *

Going back to my old home felt odd.  I’d resigned myself to never seeing it again and just being back in the U.K. felt...strange.  I’d get to see my dogs.  And my horse.  And my birds, and all the people who staffed the place, if they were still there.  Maybe mom hadn’t thrown out the things I’d left behind, although with all the Legion activity in San Francisco, I wasn’t sure I’d bring my things to that house yet, just in case.  

I tried to focus on the positive and not who I wouldn’t see, who I’d never see again.  


	34. Caledonia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mila finds out, Jack freaks out, and there are dogs. And pancakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caledonia is a song title, as usual. It's also a term for Scotland, usually used when it's being idealized.

I’d never been to the U.K.  I’d never been outside the contiguous United States.  London was colder than I’d expected, but it was December.  It felt odd to know that I was on a different continent.  

Jack had been traveling all his life so he and Mila knew the airport like the back of their hands.  They rushed through security and reclaiming our checked bags as soon as Teagan got us through some pilot back door to evade customs.  Jack and Mila were apparently used to this and it saved me trouble.  It also left me more than a little curious about what exactly their mother had done in her job; I knew the American government and military had done business with Poseidon, but regularly bypassing security seemed like their mother’s work was just a bit higher level than I’d realized.  

We got the bulky rental car and were on the road as soon as we picked up lunch.  We made sandwiches on the road, or rather Jack and I made sandwiches for everyone else because Teagan knew where we were going and was less likely to accidentally drive on the right than I was.  He hardly said a word, which was how the man typically worked; he said nothing until a topic interested him and then he’d throw in one or two sentences before falling silent again.  He spoke less than anyone I’d ever met.  

After sleeping on the plane, Jack and Mila needed something to do on the long drive north.  Jack had an idea.  Apparently, while traveling with their mother, they’d developed a version of twenty-questions without the question limit, basically a guessing game with no limit on time and the option of giving up instead of running out of questions.  At first, I thought this was because they couldn’t keep track or else that it was their attempt to make the game easier.  I quickly learned otherwise.  

Jack won the first game with Steller’s Sea Eagle and Mila’s first pick turned out to be Mary Shelley.  With no limits on category beyond “physical object” the game was insanely difficult; it easily kept us entertained for the rest of the drive, even if Jack and I did our best to keep the objects we picked within the range of what Mila might guess.  Soon enough we arrived in Oban, where we stopped to eat until the next ferry came in.  The town looked like it survived off tourists and whiskey sales.  

*       *       *

Being back in Oban really let the reality sink in that I was going back to the home I’d grown up in, at least for a few days.  After having been gone so long, I looked forward to seeing the old castle again, but first Mila, Teagan, and I all gravitated towards the all-day pancake restaurant.  Despite the other venues in Oban and despite the Scotch distillery, no shop had become such a family ritual as this one; as far back as I could remember, we’d stopped for pancakes every time we passed through the town.  Arcade, to his credit, followed us in.  I guess he was just trusting that we knew where we were going and I was too distracted by being back home after so long that I couldn’t remember to explain.  

The tourists were few and far between at this time of the year, so our little group didn’t go unnoticed.  My family were reclusive enough that most people around the town probably wouldn’t recognize us, the exceptions were the staff and owners of the pancake shop, a chocolate store down the street, and maybe the bookstore and the kilt-makers.  Just being in the pancake shop reminded me of my mother, but at least it was the good memories, so I didn’t break down, I just got very quiet.  Teagan and Arcade both seemed to notice, but I guess Mila was too happy or just figured I was just being myself.  I had to tell her soon, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so.  Maybe when we got home, although by that point she’d see that our mother wasn’t home and she’d figure it out.  It might be better if Vance told her, or better yet Holly.  I hadn’t told Arcade either, but it wasn’t as much of an issue with him.  I worried he might feel a little betrayed, but he’d understand.  Arcade would recognize that I just hadn’t been able to talk about it until I dealt with my emotions, my sister would get emotional herself, really emotional in all likelihood, and I was too unstable right now to face that.  I didn’t know what to do.  

At least we had pancakes.  The first waiter had been new, he hadn’t recognized us and until Arcade had spoken, he’d probably assumed we were also Scottish, just from somewhere further inland.  The manager must have recognized us because she came by, happily, when our food was brought out.  This early in the morning, we were the only customers here, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she paid us a personal visit.  

“Mila MacLean!”  She and my sister hugged and then she recognized me, “Sweet Jesus, Jack, you cut your hair!  Haven’t seen you in ages, how’ve you been?”  We’d known the woman for ages, she’d been serving me pancakes since I’d been five-years-old or less, the most recent picture I had of my father was a picture of my family and Trudy, the manager in this restaurant.  

I hesitated to answer and I guess she realized how quiet I’d been.  I’d spent most of the time since I’d ordered sipping my milkshake and staring out the window.  Trudy backpedaled.  “Sorry.  I heard.  It must be hard.”  I wasn’t sure what to say and neither was anyone else.  I could feel the awkward like a cold fog in the air, as invasive as the scent of pancakes.  I guess Mila just assumed that Trudy was talking about me getting disowned and kicked out, and for all I knew, that might have been what she meant.  

“You’re here for pancakes, right?  Well, milkshakes are on the house, if you want them.”  Trudy was trying to gloss over the memories she’d clearly dredged up, and Mila smiled again at her words.  Now I felt awkward because with my wealth that just felt like stealing and again, I had no idea what to say.  I ran a hand through my hair and found my fingers tracing the scar on my scalp.  

“You don’t have to do that, it’s fine.”  The words came out before I realized that was the same thing my mother always said whenever Trudy offered things like this; the realization hit me like a kick in the throat.  Trudy’s smile faltered and I knew she’d been referring to the death of my mother earlier.  

Mila grinned and giggled, “You sound just like mom, big bro.”

Uncle Tea had that look he got when all hell was about to break loose, like when he’d kept an eye on me while mom yelled at dad upstairs.  I think Trudy suspected that Mila didn’t know about our mother, but she said nothing.  Arcade looked back and forth between the three of us MacLeans in some mix of frustration and sympathy.  I wondered if he’d found out somehow.  

Trudy retreated to the kitchen before things could get more awkward and the rest of our meal passed mostly in awkward silence.  The three of us adults kept Mila entertained and she seemed to stay in a good mood, although I could tell that she realized something was going on that she hadn’t quite figured out.  I think she’d just thought I’d been coming back to Scotland to visit, or to introduce mom to Arcade (which would have been a stupendously awful idea,) but now she’d started to realize that this was business, or something close to it.  In truth, I don’t know how serious I was about Vulpes or Arcade and I think Mila realized that as well, but she wouldn’t have just assumed I was going to have my boyfriend meet my mother if I didn’t think that I wanted the relationship to be something… well, something more than a fling.  I wasn’t sure if Mila thought I knew what I was doing, romantically, or if she believed that everything I’d been through had just screwed me up so much that I was desperate for commitment and moving too fast.  I _was_ desperate for commitment, or at least desperate for someone, anyone, who would be there consistantly when I needed them.  Mila would be there, but that was different.  I was her big brother, however often she made me feel like an idiot or pretended to be a completely independent woman, she was still a kid, and more vulnerable than she let on, and it was my job to protect her.  I needed someone who would be there for me as an equal, and I realized that might drive me to move much faster in relationships than I should have, but my involvements with Arcade and Vulpes could hardly be considered standard affairs.  My love life was less of a walk in the park than a brutal series of brushes with death.  That sort of shared experience didn’t lend itself to taking one’s time.  Besides, at the rate I was going, a large part of me doubted I’d have much time to take.  

*       *       *

Taking the ferry to Jack’s island turned out to be very different than riding the ferries around the bay back home.  For one, the boat was enormous.  It was no cruise ship or aircraft carrier, but it dwarfed the standard ferries I was used to.  I guess the thing had been built for tourist season, because the cargo hold we parked in must have been able to hold thirty cars, at the very least.  As it was, there must have been ten people aboard aside from the crew, leaving the seats and observation decks eerily quiet and empty.  After the restaurant, Mila had gotten a little more subdued and Jack seemed lost in dark thoughts, yet again, although his mood currently presented itself as an increase in his restlessness.  While Mila and Teagan settled into a seat to read during the forty minute crossing, Jack roamed the ship.  Granted, I also explored, but his exploration was more of an aimless wandering of a very familiar boat while I was looking around a new place.  

I ended up reading a bit as well, it was a long ride, and today happened to be so foggy that I couldn’t even see the waves most of the time.  I spent a while trying to glimpse something amid the shifting sea of white to no avail.  I’d known San Francisco fog for a long time, but this was different.  In the city, the fog felt familiar, ordinary.  I guess it seemed more like a blanket over the city, something protective but normal.  Maybe it was just that this was a different country, especially one with such an ancient history, but here the fog felt like some kind of entity.  It was like we’d sailed out of the modern world and into some Tolkein-esque fantasy tale.  Towards the end of the crossing, the fog parted, and that sense of magic compounded.  

Through the mist ahead emerged a cliff, grey rocks rising from a darker, thrashing ocean, and above those rocks, impossibly green hills that vanished quickly into the mist.  As if the landscape had not already been so reminiscent of a fantasy epic, the cliff was crowned with a clearly ancient and still spectacular castle.  

Jack, having approached with silence I didn’t expect from him, stood beside me and explained, “That’s my home.”

I stared and pointed at the castle.  “That?”

Jack nodded.  I think he would have been happy if he wasn’t still upset.  “It’s less imposing from this side.”

I nodded.  From the back, the castle seemed more regal than threatening, but recalling that picture he’d said had shown it, the front suggested a more menacing presence.  

That also proved true.  From the ferry, we drove in silence through a colorful and tiny port town.  Mila had fallen silent, although whether Teagan had told her about her mother or if she just sensed the serious nature of this trip, I wasn’t sure.  I doubted she would know and take the news this well, and I also doubted that Teagan would seize the opportunity to tell her.  Jack stared out the window as if the misty, verdant scenery had hypnotized him.  I followed his lead while I tried to decide how and if I should, or could gently break the news to Mila.  Well, neither of her relatives where going to do it, but it just didn’t feel like it was my place to tell her.  

The driveway was so long that I would have thought it was a road if it weren’t for the signs and fences explaining otherwise.  After winding through a small forest, over creeks, and up a long series of hills, we came into view of the castle.   Even if the driveway hadn’t been designed specifically to give the estate an intimidating effect, it certainly did a good job of that.  The castle appeared suddenly, dauntingly, looking larger than it really was and looming over us at the top of a long hill.  Antique cannons lined the far edge of a small parking area, pointing towards us.  All it needed was a moat to really keep out those pesky Jehovah’s Witness.  

It seemed incredibly ironic now that Jack’s family’s house looked so unwelcoming when Jack himself sheltered anyone, up to and including armed home-invaders.  

We’d been in the car since we drove it off the ferry, so until I stepped out onto the gravel parking area, I didn’t realize how readily the damp and wind chilled through my jacket.  Teagan locked the car and turned around, waiting for Jack, or so I presumed.  Jack seemed oblivious.  

I guess, with his father long dead and his mother’s reaction now irrelevant, he might be some kind of Scottish nobility now, for all that meant.  For all his horrible luck and occasional idiocy, he’d always had a strangely mystic quality and now it seemed like that was just his lineage.  Standing here now, in the coastal wind, even with the paint-stained hoodie and worn sweat pants he was wearing, he looked like nobility.  He stared off at the ocean as if he was seeing some old and bittersweet memory.  I guess being back home conjured many memories of his past.  

Mila gave her brother a long and thoughtful stare before whistling loudly.  The sound broke Jack from his stupor and he turned around even before we all heard the tell-tale chorus of barking.  Fourteen dogs surged into view from the other side of the house, all but one of them over a meter tall.  Like a wave, the hoard hit Mila and then washed over her to Jack, whining and licking in what I could only imagine must be a miracle reunion by dog standards.  And they had no idea how right they almost were if they hadn’t expected Jack to return.  

Teagan looked at me and nodded at the somewhat damp and muddy pack of dogs.  “You know, they’ll be over here next.  Be ready.”  With that ominous warning, he turned around to go towards the door.  I figured he’d been going to ring the doorbell at the time, but he proved me wrong.  

He was right about the dogs.  Once they finished their frantic evaluation and greeting of Jack and Mila, thirteen wiggling, drooling bodies rushed towards me.  Jack, holding the fourteenth and by far the smallest dog squirming in his arms, made a sound of amused frustration and rushed after them.  I guess it was lucky the dogs didn’t jump at me like they’d jumped at Jack, but it was still pretty intimidating to face down so many very large dogs.  I did what I could to keep the frantic sniffing from knocking me over while Jack, one arm still cradling his struggling terrier, slowly pulled the others back, one by one.  Pulled away, each dog remembered he was there and give him truly pitiful apologetic glances while backing obediently away.  In the end, Jack held a wiggling mutt and thirteen enormous hounds sat all around me, heads and ears down, watching Jack as if they’d gravely disappointed him.  Mila found it all hysterical, which, I guess, it was, and I was more glad to have amused them than I would have been had I somehow avoided the canine greeting party.  By the time Jack had all the dogs calmed down, everyone was laughing.  

“Sorry,” Jack explained, “they’re just more excited than usual.”

“They miss you,” Mila cut in, “ _especially_ Turing.”  She nodded at the terrier Jack was holding, which was now licking the bottom of his chin because it couldn’t reach his face.  

“Yeah…”  As usual, Jack’s good mood proved fleeting, and the sadness was back in his eyes, but at least he was still smiling a genuine smile.  I hoped he was finally coming to terms with everything.  He stared at the dog in his arms, which stopped licking and stared back, seemingly picking up on the gravity of the situation.  “Mila, listen…”

The towering wooden doors of the castle creaked open.  Teagan was already gone, apparently he’d retreated to some guest room and none of us had noticed, but we did notice the people who emerged now.  A man with windswept auburn hair and a long dark coat stepped onto the porch.  Something about him unsettled me and it wasn’t just the way he didn’t quite leave the doorway and step into the hazy sunlight.  Behind him, another, older man with hair somewhere between white and blonde slunk off towards the car to bring in our luggage.  I heard him grumbling under his breath but couldn’t understand the words.  

Jack fell silent and looked up at this man, his smile had vanished when he started to address Mila, but now it was back, though I couldn’t tell how genuine it was.  “Hey, Vance.  It’s good to see you.”  

Vance nodded.  “We’ve gotten three of the guest rooms ready, should you want them.  Dairmad will be arriving this afternoon.”  He hesitated, as if he’d been about to elaborate but reconsidered.  His gaze paused notably on Mila before he continued, “It’s good to have you back.”  Vance turned and retreated into the foyer, which was dark.  He vanished almost immediately.  

Jack turned back to Mila and opened his mouth, but she spoke before he could.  “Jack, Morgan has an egg and the horses still have their foals, you want to see?”  She was trying to cheer him up because she didn’t realize why he was upset.  

“Yeah,” Jack looked at me, “Um, make yourself at home, there’s a library around.  Just don’t go into the basement, the staff live down there.”

I resisted the temptation to repeat his phrasing of “the staff” and likewise resisted the urge to note that that sounded weirdly like it was a crypt.  “Alright.”  That seemed like my cue to leave them alone, which hopefully meant that whatever Jack had been trying to say had been his attempts to explain to his sister what had happened.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt.  Jack and Mila walked off, presumably to see the animals Mila had mentioned.  I guess I would go find the library?  …which Jack had conveniently not given me any directions to find.  

All the lights were off inside the house.  Jeez, what were these people, vampires?  I found a switch, eventually, turning on a set of the largest crystal chandeliers I’d ever seen.  The foyer featured ornate carved wood walls, marble floors, and a set of grand staircases leading up to the second floor.  It looked like more well-maintained version of the haunted mansion.  Well, aside from the fact that the whole place was currently decorated for christmas with garlands and red velvet ribbon on everything and a three story christmas tree.  Well, this place looked like The Nutcracker merged with Dracula.  Although, knowing Jack, it might be more accurately described as The Nutcracker merged with The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  

It took nearly an hour to find the library.  While searching, I found more dark studies, living rooms, and bathrooms than seemed necessary for anyone.  A few of the studies had enough books that I investigated, wondering if Jack might have exaggerated when he’d said “library.”  I tried not to nose around too much, but some things were obvious.  For one, seeing so many books about advanced engineering and accidentally noticing a few clearly military documents, I realized that whatever Jack’s mother had done, she had probably been involved in designing advanced weapons prototypes and similarly high-level work.  As much as I felt sorry for Jack, it was probably best that I’d never met her.  

Realizing the scope of his mother’s work wasn’t the only thing I found out while searching for the library.  Practically every room in the castle, at least every room that seemed intended more for private use than for guests, had at least three framed photos.  Almost all of them looked like they’d been taken while traveling, and while some included Mila and a few showed a tall red-haired man who was probably Jack’s father, every single picture, without exception, showed Jack and his mother.  Something about her looked familiar and I wondered if I’d met her back when my parents still worked for the government.  I couldn’t think of any other way I would have seen her face; Jack certainly kept no pictures of her.  And that was sad, I guess.  The woman might have been emotionally abusive, and she’d kicked Jack out when he most needed her, but she’d clearly cared about him.  She’d kept pictures of him _everywhere,_ even after he was gone, and from all these pictures it was clear that they’d been close to each other, it wasn’t just Jack who’d felt attached to her.  I saw how close they must have been, all these pictures of Jack from just a few months ago to before he could walk, always with his mother and looking happy.  The guy lost everyone he trusted, it scared me a little to realize what that might mean, psychologically about his relationship with me.  Both extremes were bad, awful possibilities that I didn’t even want to think about.  On one hand, he might become obsessively clingy for fear of losing someone else, and that wouldn’t be healthy for either of us, but on the other, even the basic attraction could just be a symptom of his desperation to have someone in his life, to avoid being alone.  I could handle my own emotions if things went bad, or so I thought, but Jack…I was really starting to think that I’d gotten in over my head by dating someone so emotionally fragile.  That fear that somehow this was going to end in disaster raised it’s ugly head yet again and I tried to distract myself, opening another door to look for the library.  

I found it.  “Library” had definitely been an accurate description.  The room was nearly the size of a ballroom and three stories high, every wall completely covered in a mix of packed bookshelves and balconies from which to access them.  The floorspace held tables and more bookshelves while three enormous windows along the back wall looked out over the cliff.  Once I turned on this room’s opulent chandelier, the room was clearly gorgeous.  …Although with so many books, it would probably take me a while to find something to read.  

*       *       *

Mila ran off after I told her.  I think she went to her room to maybe to the kitchens, but I wasn’t sure.  I could tell she felt hurt that I hadn’t told her sooner, but I hadn’t even been able to accept it myself until today.  Now that we were here it…it seemed more real.  This was my castle, in all likelihood.  My dogs, my horses, my land.  I was the lord, I guess.  That didn’t feel right.  I’d always been one for the clothes and traditions but never the rank.  I loved it here, this was my home, but I had to go back.  I couldn’t leave Arcade and Vulpes.  If they left America…well, maybe then I’d try on the title.  

I felt like I should check on Arcade and be a good host, but I still had emotions to work out.  It didn’t feel right that this was mine, I didn’t even know for sure that it was, and what the hell was going to happen to Mila?  There was too much to sort out, too many loose ends, and I couldn’t stand having to wait to sort everything out.  Dairmad couldn’t get here soon enough.  I went back to the stables.  The foals were inside with their mothers while the stallions were rotated through the pastures.  The staff had been taking care of the animals.  They were paid automatically and it wasn’t as if the animals were going anywhere, so someone had to do it anyway.  I’d felt like everything would have changed since she’d been gone, but the more I looked around, the more it felt the same as when she’d been here and that unnerved me.  I looked for Charon.  He was out to pasture, I figured that out when I found his stall empty.  The fleeting fear that my mother had sold him vanished when I spotted that bright strawberry roan coat among the black and bay of the other horses.  Stallions didn’t get along, so they were separated.  Forbes, Brewster, and Maxwell grazed in the three far pastures, they were the calmest as well as the largest.  I saw the heard of sheep in the only pasture beyond those, a clump of white like a ball of dirty lint on the lawn.  In among the lower white shapes rose a dozen taller forms, the alpaca herd.  They weren’t the best suited to Scotland and the tourists didn’t really like seeing them, so we kept them off the pastures closer to the road.  The cows, Graham and Bell, grazed up by the sheep, in their own pen.  They were the ones we let the tourists see.  Only two of the pastures closest to the stable were occupied, it looked like the fence had broken on the third.  That was probably because of Watt, judging by the bandage on our temperamental thoroughbred’s leg.  Watt had days where he’d bite and kick everything, he had always been a bit of a problem horse.  Even now, standing in his pasture, Watt watched the peacefully grazing forms of the Clydesdales and pawed the ground.  Charon must have smelled me arrive, or maybe he was just hungry.  My big Irish Hunter trotted over to the gate and nibbled it impatiently, watching me.  He was a quiet horse, and something about his attitude always made me think he felt just as awkward as I did most of the time.  He saw me getting his tack ready and knew what was going on well before I set up the jumps.  

Aside from painting and writing, I rode to calm down.  Riding might have been a lot quicker, aside from the time it took to get ready and care for the horse.  I would have rode before if it had been possible, and the thing I liked least about city life was simply that I couldn’t feasibly ride every day.  The horses had been ridden in my absence, that was one of the things I’d usually taken care of myself when I’d lived here, but I doubted the Family had or could have really kept Charon at the top of his game, so I set the jumps low.  In truth, we were athletes, or at least he was and I used to be.  Even disregarding the lingering injuries I’d taken since I’d moved to America, I hadn’t ridden Charon competitively since I’d left for college.  I’d kept him in shape because he deserved it and it helped that he looked like a great hunter when we studded him out, but he didn’t compete any more.  At the time, it had devastated me that with my height and weight I just wasn’t capable of riding competitively, but I’d found other talents and it didn’t matter to me as much anymore.  I still loved the feeling of riding, feeling the power of this huge animal moving me so much faster than I could run, leaping hurdles nearly as tall as he was…  Or, currently, about as tall as the dogs.  If anyone saw us, I missed the effect of my long hair trailing behind me and Charon, still muddy from rolling in the pasture grass, didn’t look too striking either, but I wasn’t riding for show right now.  I went through the course almost blindly, only listening to Charon’s breathing and waiting until he needed to rest.  He didn’t.  My stallion had been kept in shape, or at least ridden long enough that he could do this for hours.  Admittedly, I wasn’t riding him very hard, but still.  

I let myself get lost in my thoughts, loving the thrill of the leap and the speed, but allowing my thoughts to roam.  Why hadn’t I dreamed the plane crash?  I’d dreamed the office where Vulpes had worked, I’d dreamed dad’s car crash, I’d dreamed dozens of things that had no impact on my life at all, and I hadn’t dreamed that?  I hadn’t dreamed it, I hadn’t had any chance to warn her, to stop her, to do _something_ …!  What use was this dream-premonition ability if it didn’t even let me save my own mother?  Why did I even have this?!  I cursed it, cursed god, begged him to take it back just so she’d be back even though I knew that wouldn’t work.  Charon slowed to a stop and stood still, flicking his ears back to listen, worriedly while I swore.  

What the fuck was I supposed to do about Mila?  I couldn’t raise her, I couldn’t be a parent, not now, not me, not while I was still trying to sort out what the fuck I was even feeling about all this, not while I was tangled up with the Legion and my stupid relationship problems and trying to sort out how the fuck I was supposed to stop what I kept seeing in my dreams.  It was too much!  What the fuck was I supposed to do about Mila?!


	35. You May Be Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Horses are ridden, lawyers are dealt with, and Arcade is completely out of his element.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title in reference to stuff Mila says towards the end.   
> Also, I'm really going to need to finish this soon. I have seventeen pages of notes and it's gotten to the point that I'm constantly struggling to remember details I mentioned or planned for as well a minor continuity things like what the heck was Jack's mother's name. Writing this has become incredibly difficult and I need to finish or I'm never going to, and I insist on finishing this. I don't know exactly how many more chapters there will be, and the next is definitely not the last, but pacing is killing me right now. Having so many holidays included means there's a lot of time to fill and that's been another huge obstacle to writing this. As a result, there's going to be a few weeks time skip at the start of the next chapter, but that's when things really start to escalate again and I'd rather skip ahead a little than slog through another chapter that's so much Jack and Arcade fluff. There will still be fluff, or course, but there will actually be action and more important things too. And Jack getting way ahead of himself, as usual.

I had figured that Jack would probably come and find me once he was done talking to Mila, so when the library door opened, I expected to see him.  Instead, I found a red-haired young woman whose clothing suggested that she might be one of the people who worked on the estate.  

“Hey, sorry to interrupt.  Dairmot’s here, do you know where Jack disappeared to?”

She actually sounded less Scottish than the others, but I still wasn’t about to try pronouncing the name she’d just said.  I shrugged.  “He had to talk to his sister, I think they went to the stables, but I’m not sure they should be interrupted…”  as I spoke, I realized how dark the sky had gotten out the towering windows.  It looked like I must have been reading well into the evening, but checking my watch, it was barely four in the afternoon.  We must be farther north than I’d expected.  

The woman sighed, “He’s only telling her about their mother now, isn’t he?”

“That seems to be the case.”

“Jeez, what _is_ it with this family?”  She shook her head and walked over to me.  She introduced herself as Brianna and after the basic pleasantries, she suggested, “Dairmot’s here on business, so even if Jack is still talking to Mila, somebody should find him.  Hopefully the poor guy will be alright enough to sort out the legal stuff now, life’s kinda put him through the wringer lately, but Dairmot’s a busy man and he’ll want this sorted out so he isn’t stuck on the island overnight.”

“Dairmot’s a lawyer?” I guessed, probably butchering the name in the process.  

Brianna nodded.  “He’s here to sort out the will.  He knows the family, that is to say Jack’s family well enough, he’s been here before and probably expects Jack to be emotional right now.  He should be understanding if Jack’s a bit late.”  

That was good.  I put the book away, figuring that I’d help find Jack.  As I walked back to the shelf where I’d got it, she asked bluntly.  “So, which one are you with?”

“What?”  

“You came here with two different gay men and I get the same vibe from you, so which is it?”

That seemed kind of nosy to ask, but on the other hand she could just be wondering because if I was dating Jack, I was the best person to talk to him if he was emotional, where as if I was just his uncle’s boyfriend that wasn’t really my place.  And at least she hadn’t just assumed I was dating Teagan because we were closer in age.  “I’m with Jack.”

She smiled.  “Good.  He’s lost a lot of people it’s nice that he’s with someone… stable.”

“I’m not sure if you’re saying I’m boring or old, but there’s an insult in there somewhere.”

She got that I was mostly joking and chuckled.  “The stables are down the hall and outside, the lights should still be on.  If Jack didn’t come back, he’s probably riding.  Dairmot’s waiting in the living room if you find Jack.”  

~       ~       ~

As it turned out, she was right.  I found Jack riding a horse outside.  The stable was lit up, albeit minimally, and it was a good distance away along a gravel path, but the night was fairly mild and now that the fog had cleared, the sky looked beautiful.  I enjoyed the view in between trying to recognize the animals moving around in the night and trying to spot Jack.  A cat startled me while I was trying to pick out a moving shape near the light by the stable.  The scruffy manx yowled at me from barely five feet away before it slunk across the path and vanished into the dark expanse of lawn.  I didn’t know if it was a stray or a pet, and didn’t really care.  Something about that eerie yowl in the otherwise silent night unnerved me, like the damn thing had been some kind of omen.  As crazy as my life had been lately and given my history, I didn’t believe in omens, but if this really was one, I didn’t want to think what new nightmare it might foretell.  

Jack really was riding.  I found him on some kind of horse jumping course in the near-darkness.  The nearest end of the stable had a single light pointed out over the course, but that light only lit a fraction of it.  He was off towards the farthest end when I reached the course and spotted him.  I have to admit that as emotionally fragile as he could be, I felt relieved to find him here.  A small part of me had feared what he might do, given his history.  

From a distance, he and the horse just looked graceful, maybe beautiful, and that beauty stayed as they got closer, but I didn’t quite expect the size of the animal.  I’d never really seen a horse in person.  I mean, everyone knew what horses looked like and I’d probably seen a pony at some point as a kid, but I wasn’t exactly at home around livestock and as much as this horse seemed more suited to looking fancy than cattle ranching or plowing, it managed to be the biggest animal I’d ever seen up close, with the possible exception of the bear.  It might have just been due to the fact that, with the placement of the light, he couldn’t see me very well, but Jack rode right up to me.  I have to say, even though I’d understood the tactic in theory, nothing confirmed why calvary had been so effective as having such a huge animal run over to me.  Jack wasn’t even galloping (at least I don’t think he was) and he slowed the horse as it got close to me, but the animal still moved a lot faster than I would have liked given that it came to a stop directly beside me, so close that I couldn’t have taken a full step towards it without running into fur.  And up close, the horse’s back managed to be eye-level to me.  I wasn’t entirely comfortable having such a large animal so close to me, although I can’t say I didn’t appreciate having Jack’s hips at that same height.  Being slightly afraid of the horse helped to get me focused again.  

“Dairmot’s here.  Are you alright?”  

He nodded, letting the reins rest more loosely in his hands.  “I’m sorry, I should have explained why I had to come here—”

“Teagan told me.  It’s fine.  You told Mila?”  

He nodded again.  The horse, apparently as curious as the dogs, turned an enormous reddish face my way and started sniffing my coat.  I’d put my hands in my pockets and now I wasn’t sure I should take them out, that was a very big mouth and didn’t some horses bite?  Jack seemed to realize that I was a bit intimidated by the massive animal.  “Sorry, I forget that Charon can be kind of intimidating.”  He apparently gave the animal a command by twitching his leg, considering no other part of his body made any visible gesture and the horse stepped carefully sideways, giving me a bit more room between it and the side of the barn.  

“You named your horse Charon?”  I wasn’t surprised, Jack had enough morbid tendencies for that, it just worried me a bit, thinking of his mental state.  It worried me more once he explained.  

Jack shook his head.  “Officially, Charon’s name is `Ferry of the Damned,’ but that didn’t make good nicknames, so we call him Charon.”  The horse was still watching me even now that Jack had edged it away and it stretched out its neck to lip at my sleeve.  Jack tapped the back of its neck and it left me alone.  Apparently he also realized what I wondered about the name.  “I got the horse about five years ago and wasn’t in the best place emotionally at that time.  I haven’t been very healthy emotionally for most of my life, but you pretty much know that.  I guess it’s sort of ironic, but despite everything, I’ve probably been in a better state of mind lately than I’ve been for a long time.”

“That’s good to hear.”  That sounded like he was getting better.  Maybe all my efforts to help him were finally paying off.  Now let’s just hope life didn’t throw him another curve-ball.  

Apparently being on a horse had Jack as in his element as I’d ever seen him.  Half the time he seemed like a klutz and yet he swung himself off the horse with grace he hardly ever showed.  I’d only seen him moving with such ease when I watched him paint, or, actually, during sex.  That realization made me blush and the ridiculously tight riding pants he was wearing right now didn’t help.  

My reaction didn’t go unnoticed, much to my embarrassment.  He chuckled, reaching up to lead his horse into the stables.  “See, I knew some parts of this would appeal to you.”  I followed him as he hitched the horse to a thin chain in the hallway between the stalls.  The place was heated, I could feel that now.  Thinking about it, that made sense, this was a breeding farm, from the sound of things.  As distracting as those pants could be, I’d rather keep Jack in view, especially if we were going to keep talking while he took care of his horse.  I went further into the stables to see him around the stallion.  The horse didn’t seem happy to have me behind it anyway, it kept tugging at the chain and trying to see me, now Charon was still staring at me, pointed ears standing straight up atop his long face, but at least if I was in front of him the horse seemed to be in a better position for Jack, who was working to take off his saddle and all the other stuff horses wore.  Riding happened to be one of the topics I knew next to nothing about.  

“I’d encourage that line of thinking, except if I don’t sort things out with Dairmot soon, somebody else will come looking for me.”  He seemed surprisingly alright considering this situation, I’d thought this was all his usual way of hiding how upset he was, but this time he seemed genuine.  I decided to risk a question about that.  

“It seems quick to have somebody sorting out the will if your sister just found out, how long ago did this happen?”

I almost thought I’d misjudged the sincerity of his mood with how quickly the joy left his eyes, but he got back to a more neutral mood almost as quickly.  “It’s been a while,” Jack explained, “I looked it up in the news, it’s been nearly a month, but I only found out a few days ago when Dairmot called me on Thanksgiving.”

That stunned me to silence for a few second before my inability to shut up got the better of me.  “You found out from the _lawyer_?”  Apparently, this family’s inability to communicate went deeper than I’d realized.  Another truth dawned on me as I processed the timing.  “That was the call you got that night.  That was why you were so upset when I found you.”  I leaned back against the wooden door of a stall in shock.  Now I wasn’t sure if his mood had anything to do with Vulpes or if it was a combination of that news and an unrelated rape, making his emotions even more justified than they’d already seemed to be.  

Jack shook his head dismissively, getting a set of brushes and tools to clean Charon.  “I’m fine now, I’ve dealt with it.  But yes, that’s what happened.”  He muttered something that was drowned out by a whinny from the other end of the barn.  

“What was that last bit?”

“Nothing.”  

`Nothing’ had sounded ominously like `I wish there wasn’t worse to come.’  But that didn’t make sense.  I dismissed it as paranoia from one of us, either by me mishearing his words or by him expecting the worst.  I might have said more about that except that at that moment a very large nose sniffed the back of my head.  

*       *       *

Arcade’s yelp startled me into dropping the hoof pick I’d been about to use, which in turn startled Charon.  The horse, almost as jumpy as I could be, but well-trained, flinched and shrieked, stomping one of his back hooves loudly on the barn floor.  I didn’t know what to expect as I picked the tool back up and looked to see what had happened, but I found Arcade visibly startled and standing a few feet from the stall he’d been leaning against.  A huge black face with a white blaze poked through the window over the stall door.  The mare and the man stared at each other, one with surprise and one hopefully.  

I laughed, guessing what had happened.  “She licked the back of your neck, didn’t she?”

Arcade turned that surprised gaze back to me, calming down now, although he still looked adorable out of his element.  “No, she sniffed me.  She licks people?”

“I think she spent too much time with the dogs as a foal,”  I walked over to pat our youngest adult Clydesdale, leaving Charon to relax before I got back to work on him.  As if demonstrating what I’d said, Leslie stuck out her tongue as soon as I got within reach, although I evaded her licks to pat her snout.  Now that he knew the mare was there, I could tell he was intimidated by her size even more than Charon’s and that wasn’t surprising; Leslie had grown so large that we could almost mistake her for one of the draft stallions.  Charon was a tall Irish Hunter, being a little over seventeen hands tall, our Clydesdale stallions, on the other hand, stood nineteen or taller.  Leslie was nearly that large.  “She’s our biggest mare,” I explained, “but she’s friendly.  It’s alright, she’ll just lick, we’ve trained her so she’s good with strangers, even more than the others.  Watt’s the only one you really need to worry about and he’s still outside.”  

“Sorry, she startled me.”

“It’s fine, they’re very powerful animals, but they’re really just like big dogs.”  Although they weren’t usually quite this curious.  Looking around, I saw all the mares watching Arcade from their stalls and behind me, Charon had his ears perked like he expected a treat…  Arcade had his hands in his pockets.  I laughed as I realized what it was and my very urban boyfriend raised an eyebrow.  

“What?”

“They think you have treats.”  Ending his continued confusion, I explained, “We trained them to be friendly to guests by having most guests give them treats, usually apples, and we typically had people carry the treats in their pockets, so they’d have their hands in their pockets.  We started putting the treats in airtight containers in people’s pockets when Forbes and Sheila figured out that they only got food when they could smell it.  Charon thinks the same way even though we didn’t actively try to train him that way because I tend to carry treats down here in my coat pockets.”

“Oh.”

With so many expectant faces I spent nearly an hour after putting Charon into his stall getting my boyfriend slightly more comfortable with horses.  Between the wonderful, silly animals that were practically a part of my family and how adorable I found Arcade’s uncertainty around the gentle giants, Dairmot and the grave reason for our visit completely slipped my mind until Holly arrived to find me.  She usually cared for the horses, she had a way with animals almost like my own and however reclusive the Family tended to be, their eccentricities had always meshed well with the odd lifestyle of my own family.  

“Hey, lovebirds,” she remarked in what was clearly a friendly tone, “Dairmot’s still waiting and you’re missing a spectacular sky.”  

*       *       *

She hadn’t exaggerated.  Even if it had gotten colder, walking back to the castle, we saw that night had fallen completely.  The sky had an impressive display of stars, but more incredible were the other lights.  We were _definitely_ farther North than I’d realized.  I paused as soon as I saw them and Jack stopped a few yards ahead where, I soon discovered, the greater distance from the lights of the stables gave an even better view.  Shimmering ribbons of green, blue, pink, and purple danced across the sky in a natural spectacle I’d never expected to see in person.  

“It doesn’t often come down this far,” Jack explained, “usually we only get the shorter days and such, but the auroras do seem to be getting down her a bit more often.  I didn’t expect one while we were here, so I didn’t mention it but hey, I guess it’s just another way I’m getting lucky.”  I shot him a sidelong glance, wondering if he meant that as a pun, if he meant it flirtatiously, if he was commenting on the irony of his brushes with death (or his luck to survive them all), or if he meant it as some combination of all three.  

Jack continued after a moment, presumably trying to hurry now that he’d evaded the lawyer for well over an hour, “I should go deal with Dairmot.  This is probably my place now, more or less, not that I plan to move back here or anything, so make yourself at home.  I’ll probably come find you once the legal stuff is dealt with.”

Whether or not his parents had been great hosts, Jack certainly didn’t seem to have inherited that skill.  

~       ~       ~

While Jack sorted out his mother’s will, I searched for a kitchen.  Apparently, there were several, so I guess it was lucky that the one I found happened to be occupied.  

Teagan was brewing coffee.  Seeing me, he waved and nodded towards the fridge.  “Dinner’s been made.  I think the Family are glad one of us might end up staying here, they had a rough time of it before my sister-in-law gave them a place to live.”  

That was significantly more than I’d expected him to say.  I went about getting food as I replied, “Why?”  They seemed a bit odd, sure, but nothing that would cause them trouble living normal lives, at least I hadn’t noticed anything like that.  Heck, maybe they were all secretly cannibals or something.  

Teagan shrugged vaguely, “They’re a bit… strange.”

No specifics.  As usual.  Although even what he’d said was more than I’d expected him to say.  I sighed in frustration, “Jeez, you probably know more about me than I’ve heard from either you or Jack, and I was raised by six C— ...six very secretive people.”

Teagan gave me a curious look that mirrored the way I usually looked at him with more irony than I liked.  Now who was being enigmatic?  I turned back to the food.  “I’ll just get my dinner.”

*       *      *

With the will sorted out, I went up to my room.  It was funny in a way, when mom had kicked me out I’d felt like I’d left so much behind and I’d spent weeks thinking of more and more things that I’d need to pick up and take with me to my new place, but now that I was here, none of it seemed that important any more.  There were paintings, some good, some bad, and lots of books, including my personal copies of my writing, stashed away in the back of smaller closet.  The large closet had clothes; I’d never hidden anything there because my mother so often went in to pick out what she insisted I wear or get rid of the clothes that seemed too old or too worn or that she just didn’t like.  My other closet held games and stuffed animals and all the things I hadn’t wanted her to find.  If my room had not been so enormous, it would have been a mess.  As it was, I had shelf upon shelf of books, video games, old stuffed animals, and framed pictures.  The carpet was black so mother couldn’t complain that it looked dingy.  I had a tapestry and paintings of wild animals on every open wall as well as another fifty or so paintings in a painting shelf that was basically a series of deep slots in one wall.  Another shelf above my battered antique dresser held my desperate attempts to impress my mother and convince myself of my own worth in the form of every award I’d ever gotten and nearly a dozen riding trophies.  The awards ranged from a first place ribbon from a local art show to a dusty and faded certificate saying I’d graduated preschool at the top of my tiny in more than one way class.  I’d apparently earned the dubious title of smartest, by someone’s unknown standards, of the seven or so preschoolers on the island.  Some of the stuff here brought back memories, and I didn’t exactly want to loose my riding trophies or the twenty-year-old stuffed tiger that had been my favorite toy growing up, but nothing here felt so important any more than I wanted to bring it back with me.  I’d leave it here as it was, or maybe put it into storage or the attic.  

I hadn’t closed the door when I’d walked inside to look around and maybe pack something to take with me, so it remained slightly open and I didn’t notice that Mila stood in the doorway until she spoke.  “You’re dating both of them, both Vulpes and the doctor, aren’t you?”  She’d calmed down, at least for now and she had that commanding tone she’d learned from my mother.  I could see that she’d been crying, of course, but for now she was all business.  This was how my sister got when she had something on her mind, something she felt was critically important.  She’d done this when she’d wanted to convince our mother to buy her a pony the afternoon after we’d awakened to find our friendliest mare dead in the stables.  The horse had died brutally, having miscarried in the sort of worst-case-scenario I’d read about years later in veterinary books, so we’d all been pretty broken up about it, or at least Mila and I had.  Mila had been planning to ask for a pony for quite some time, although of course she’d never gotten one, but she’d felt that the open stall necessitated that she voice her request right then, and likewise whatever she wanted to ask now seemed to be something she deemed urgent.  That was part of why her initial question made me raise an eyebrow.  

“Yes.  People do that, Mila.  Why do you ask?”  I realized after I spoke that I don’t think I’d mentioned Arcade’s profession.  “How do you know he’s a doctor?”

“He washes his hands like a surgeon, I saw him do that in the kitchen the other day.”  She was right.  It amazed me to realize it, but Arcade _did_ wash his hands like a surgeon, he didn’t wash his hands so much as his arms up to the elbow.  She’d lapsed out of her serious persona for a moment, but now that returned full force along with an adorably concerned frown.  “But they don’t both know, do they?”

I snorted, trying to make light of it so she’d change the subject or let it go.  “ _Vulpes_ knows.”  Vulpes knows damn near everything.  

“But Arcade _doesn’t_!” she whimpered, picking up on the implications of my omission.  “Jack, he’s really sweet, and he really likes you, and he’d be really good for you—!”

“And Vulpes wouldn’t?”  I knew the answer to that.  Even with him seeming less likely to kill me now, if I stuck with him, sooner or later, one or both of us would end up dead.  Arcade was the safer choice.  

Mila scowled.  “Jack!  He really cares about you, I don’t want to see you hurt him!”

She had a point, and she was completely in the right, and I didn’t want to hurt Arcade, and I knew I would if I kept on like this, but all that just made it worse when she pointed it out.  I snapped at her, switching to Gaelic, “Mila, I _know_ that!  I _know_ all of that, don’t you think I— ?  This is an adult thing, you don’t understand, and I’ve been through a hell of a lot of shit and I just can’t sort through this too right now on top of everything else.”  My conjugation and grammar probably died towards the end of that and I might have mixed in some German, but she apparently understood me.  

Mila retorted in a lengthy, angry mix of the same two languages with a sprinkling of Japanese, mostly berating my inability to make decisions and the way that I always complicated everything before she stormed off to her room, nearly running into Arcade who had just come upstairs and luckily missed everything before we stopped speaking English.  Mila told him something in angry Japanese and may have been talking at him, I didn’t hear what she said and it might as well have been gibberish to the doctor.  

I groaned and rubbed my temples in exasperation while he walked over to me, looking adorably puzzled.  

“Was that Japanese?”

“Some of it.”  I sighed, “I don’t want to talk about that, are you finding everything alright?”  

“I’ll get by.”  He looked around my room, which was larger than the apartment he’d had when I’d met him, if I remembered correctly.  “Your house is rather…labyrinthine.”  

I nodded.  “It takes a while to learn your way around.”

He gestured back towards the door that had closed behind him, “Is she going to be alright?”

“I’m sure she will.  She’s a tough kid, she takes after her half-brother.”  He raised an eyebrow.  “Her _other_ half-brother.”

“Should we expect her to start dealing with terrorism and human-trafficking any time soon?”  He was trying to lighten the mood, but it also showed his distaste for Vulpes.  I had to wonder, if I did admit that he wasn’t the only man in my life, would he just write me off as a lost cause, would he be angry, or, even worse, would he take it upon himself to save me by one means or another?

I shook off the concern, lying back on my bed while I answered, trying to keep my tone light, “She has too much integrity for that, although I wouldn’t want her around me with a sharp object right now.”

He sat on the bed beside me.  “Well, you did kind of spring it on her about what happened to your mother.”

“Not the best choice I’ve ever made, but that isn’t what she’s on about right now.”

He leaned back onto his elbows and raised an eyebrow at me.  “Oh?”

Great.  Why had I said that and made him curious?  “It’s a long story and it’s not important.”  He seemed to believe me, but I wasn’t sure.  It was best if I distract him.  I rolled onto my stomach.  “It’s been a long day, and I’m still in my chaps, so what do you say we continue this international incident?”  I knew I’d distracted him as soon as he kissed me. 


	36. The Catalyst

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back in America and after a few uneventful weeks, Jack has a crazy idea. Or at least one crazier than his usual ideas. Also, Caesar does not take kindly to frumentari who vanish for weeks on end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter name from the Linkin Park song.   
> This a shorter chapter, but I'll hopefully have the next up soon.  
> Also, I'm sorry this took so long to update. I will hopefully be adding chapters more quickly until I finish it, but I've proved myself wrong before. I really want to finish this soon especially because the plot's gotten so involved that I pretty much reread it overtime I haven't worked on it in a while.  
> The plot is one hurdle, but mostly the issues I was working through that drove me to start writing it are dealt with by now and now some things are hitting a little close to home for me, although that part is mostly done with now.   
> When I do finish this, I'll probably focus on other fandoms for a bit, I'm not sure how long, I have an FMA fan fic idea in the works, though I hopefully won't start that until this is finished, but I may work more on Piebald at the same time.

Caesar stared at me, clearly angry although he hid his mood well enough that I couldn’t determine the extent of his rage.  “I understand that sometimes complications arise in your work and you cannot report back for some time, but this has happened too many times lately for me to ignore this instance.  Understand that if you hadn’t served me so well in the past, I’d have you crucified for this disappointment.  You had better have a good explanation for your disappearance over the past few weeks.”  

It _had_ been weeks.  After Alerio had moved me to a safer location than Jack’s house, it had taken several days for the infection to subside enough that I could think clearly.  It was lucky that Alerio had been willing to continue treating me with profligate antibiotics.  By now the wound had nearly healed, but it still disconcerted me to know how long I had been recovering.  Understandably, Caesar did not appreciate my absence and I knew that the odds of him sparing me were very slim.  In all likelihood, he would have me executed and I had yet to decide if I would fight him should that be the case.  I was not disloyal to Caesar, even if sometimes I bent the rules.  

As a result, I opted for honesty, although I phrased my explanation to imply that I had simply been found by Arcade who had helped me out of the kindness of his heart while I was in no state to protest.  I made no mention what-so-ever of Jack and did everything I could to suggest that I would not have accepted profligate medicine if I had been coherent at the time.  For a long moment after I finished my explanation, nervous silence hung in the air.  The praetorian guard were the nervous ones, few individuals liked reminders that even the highest ranking of the Legion remained vulnerable to brutal punishment.  And the members of the guard who disliked me were not present in this room, although I can’t say that these were my friends, only that they would probably cringe if Caesar judged me harshly and might prefer that, if they must fight me, someone else would land the fatal blow.  

With the gravity of the situation, it took all of us longer than it should have to realize that Caesar’s blank stare was not his contemplation of my fate but rather another of his episodes.  

Coming to, he scowled and stood.  “Come back tomorrow!  I will judge your failure then.”  He stormed into the back room, leaving the praetorian guard to give me looks which ranged from confused to congratulatory.  It gave me more time, I suppose, but I can’t say that I found the delay pleasing.  I fully expected some form of punishment, likely fatal, and waiting only left me to wonder whether or not my will to live exceeded my loyalty to the Legion.  I decided to be somewhat more careful at least for the next week, even if it meant avoiding Jack during that time.  

*       *       *

In the end, Mila had stayed in the castle with Teagan moving in to care for her.  She still wasn’t happy about my personal life and neither was she glad that I’d waited so long to mention mom’s death, but she still cared about me, so she emerged for a very moody goodbye before retreating back to her room.  If I could have taken Charon with me, I would have.  As it was, I brought Turing.  The little old terrier got along with all animals, even ones that hated him, and I missed him enough that I’d deal with keeping them separated should Rex prove unfriendly.  

As it turned out, Rex and Turing got along spectacularly and life settled back into normality, at least as normal as my life ever got, for a few weeks.  We returned to find Vulpes gone and I heard nothing from him for several weeks.  His articles didn’t show up in the paper either, but this was Vulpes.  Despite the state he’d been in when I’d last seen him, I trusted completely that he was fine, probably busy with work for the Legion.  It seemed strange how much I could trust him when given past experience, I never trusted anyone and lately everyone I’d trusted had died.  I didn’t believe Vulpes was dead, whether that was denial or faith, I don’t know, I just trusted that he’d contact me again when he had time.  

Arcade went back to work and often came home frustrated as terrorist attacks probably instigated by the Legion continued to plague the city.  I was more than happy to cheer him up, of course, especially now that I was in a pretty good mood myself.  The only thing still bothering me was my recurring nightmare, which part of me hoped wasn’t a prediction at all, just a crazy dream.  I worked out my worry about that and kept myself occupied by painting and writing, as usual, but I have to admit, that when I slept, I found myself easing back into that dream almost instantly, obsessed with finding a solution that didn’t end with anyone dead.  

My painting was also giving me trouble and at the time, that seemed to be the more pressing concern.  Suffering and worry usually drove me to do better work, so I mostly presumed that being relatively happy was the reason that my painting had not been going well.  Right now, I was working to finish the painting of a man, symbolically myself, riding a horse into San Francisco.  The man and horse looked perfect, gorgeous, it was the buildings that caused problems.  I could not for the life of me paint a straight line.  No matter how hard I tried, the buildings warped and twisted.  The sunrise in the background refused to blend properly, taking on the extreme glow and size of an explosion.  After weeks and adding layers of paint until the canvas became a slab of veritable impasto, I gave up.  The buildings refused to be solid and the sun refused to be a sun, drawing inspiration from the photograph in my bedroom, I went a more morbid route.  

I had music playing, so I didn’t hear when Arcade arrived.  

*      *       *

I went upstairs to find Jack almost as soon as I got back.  He was painting of course, he was almost always painting and it was usually the same painting.  I’d realized by now that he was having some problem getting it right, but he must have given up on his original idea because what I saw on the canvas was definitely not the peaceful landscape I had expected.  

The buildings twisted as if melting, some forming arches that resembled ribs and others that had white steel skeletons seeming to glow through their architecture.  The sunset in the background had been changed to be the brilliant glow of a nuclear detonation complete with mushroom cloud.  Jack painted the last subtle details of the lighting while humming along to “Cotton Eye Joe.”  

“Well…that got darker than I’d expected.”

Jack chuckled.  “I couldn’t get it to work any other way.”  He stepped back to consider it and shrugged.  “I like it.  It’s beautiful, setting aside the morbid nature, and I still enjoy painting memento mori.”

“Jack…” I hesitated, a little afraid that I’d dredge up one of his traumas, even if he had been doing so much better emotionally, “you _are_ doing alright, aren’t you?”

He nodded.  “I’m fine.”  Leaning against the table where he had his pallet set up, he paused and added, “Look, just in the past few months I’ve nearly died at least twice, I’ve been a lot closer to death than most people and I guess I’m kind of…fascinated by it as a result.”  

“…fair enough.”  I didn’t mind him being morbid, he certainly had enough experience with death, it was better that he become fascinated by it than desensitized to it.  

After a moment or so, Jack went back to painting and remarked, “I already ate because paint and food are a bad combination, but I did cook and there’s chicken in the fridge if you want it.”

“Sure.”

*       *       *

He went downstairs and I got back to painting.  With Christmas coming up, gifts were something I had to start thinking about and even setting aside the awkwardness that came from my financial situation and needing to carefully judge the price of things, I had an idea that was probably borderline insane.  Of the people on my increasingly short list of friends and family, only two really posed any problem.  The problem was less what to get them and more to do with a plan that had formed in the back of my mind before I’d fully realized what I was considering.  It was completely absurd.  

But then again, with my track record, the only certainty in life was death, and I couldn’t trust that I’d have a long time before that.  Between the dream I’d been having and everything going on in this city of late, I might be dead within the week, though I liked to think I’d have at least a month.  It was that worry that drove me to consider something that was probably beyond rash simply because I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.  

I might regret it if I went though with my idea, but I knew I’d regret it if I never got the chance.  I had to at least prepare for it.  

*       *       *


	37. Shut Up and Dance With Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arcade has reason to investigate the Legion. Meanwhile Jack tries to decide between Vulpes and Arcade.

Today was a good day.  At least, I wanted to label it a good day.  We had no bombings, no plane crashes, and as far as I was aware, no more mysterious radiation leaks.  _That_ had been a bad day.  And today there had only been five lethal shootings.  Things were looking up…I hoped.  

Today my shift had changed and I was working during the day, in the ER.  Technically, I wasn’t an ER doctor, but pretty much everyone got called in when disaster struck and disaster had been striking like an underpaid teacher lately.  I’d gotten very used to the ER these past weeks, but even during emergencies, I usually worked at night.  I worked really long hours because we had too few doctors and too few beds for the amount of people dying in San Francisco lately, but most of them were usually at night.  Getting called in during the day had been an unexpected and not at all pleasant surprise.  I was exhausted.  Jack had actually been getting a decent amount of sleep lately, which seemed like a good sign, and of course my phone hadn’t awakened him.  I’d left a note; I’d actually tried to wake him but the guy slept like the comatose.  

I did find it odd that I’d been called in and I did ask.  Julie was actually the only person I worked with whom I often spoke to, though I wouldn’t exactly call her a friend, and as she’d been the one to call me in, of course I’d asked why.  She hadn’t wanted to answer.  After an awkward pause, she’d just said that they needed to hire some more doctors and I’d let it go figuring somebody got fired or quit.  Given the way things had been lately, the latter seemed more likely.  

After six heart attacks, seventeen colds, five broken bones, a sprained ankle, three false alarms, and a patient with a live cockroach in his ear, I overheard some orderlies gossiping by the coffee machine.  

“… they just found Steigman yesterday and now Edwards is missing!  Twenty bucks says he’s the same way.”  I didn’t know the guy’s name, and he was facing away from me, so I couldn’t see his name tag as he talked to Jacobs, a scrawny twenty-year-old who did his job well but his enthusiasm for death and violence made him just plain creepy.  Jacobs looked so happy right now that I had a few guesses what had happened before they gave more detail.  

“You idiot,” Jacobs rebuked, “Steigman was always a bit unstable and he just shot himself, they found him in his office.”  That confirmed one of my guesses.  Steigman had been a good doctor even if he was always sort of an arrogant prick.  He usually worked the shift I now had in the ER, so I figured that was why Julie had been reluctant to explain.  Given the state of things, she had a few counselors available if the staff needed them and there had already been one suicide last month.  Steigman notoriously ignored them; he’d suffered a breakdown once before, during a surgery no less.  The news that he’d killed himself bothered me much less than I would have liked, but it wasn’t surprising.  

Edwards, on the other hand, had been the picture of mental health and it just seemed weird for him to kill himself.  I mean, I didn’t know him that well, but he told everyone he met about his lovely wife and adorable children; the guy seemed so cheerful that, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was high.  Were they sure it was suicide?

Jacobs continued, “Edwards just vanished.  Nobody’s heard from him since yesterday morning, he took an early lunch break and nobody’s seen him since.  The cops searched his home and the hospital and there’s no sign of him, not even on the security footage, it’s just _weird_.”

A third orderly— Stephens, according to his name tag— just shrugged.  “So?  Maybe he just skipped town?  I mean, they don’t watch every entrance, do they?  Maybe nobody noticed him.”

Jacobs shook his head.  “What are you, an idiot?”

The second orderly sighed and spoke before Jacobs could continue.  “They _do_ watch every entrance, man.”

Stephens looked concerned.  “…oh.”  

Enjoying his distress, Jacobs let out a cackling laugh.  “Yeah, you should be more careful where you smoke pot, I’m sure they’re more interested in that than a missing doctor.”  Sadistic grin intact, his tone got slightly more serious, “The guy didn’t skip town, his cars’ still in his parking space outside and they found both his keys _and his wallet_ in his staff locker.  My guess is he’s been kidnapped, maybe murdered, and they’ll find his dismembered body on the beach or in a dumpster within three days, if they ever find him, that is.  I really hope they show it on the news…”  His ability to put forth this theory so cheerfully made me seriously consider reporting him to HR, or maybe the cops.  

The orderly that was not Stephens or Jacobs seemed to share my concern.  He frowned.  “You _really_ seem to know what happened here…”

Jacobs waved dismissively.  “I’m just impressed is all, it’s not easy to snatch a doctor from this hospital— or rather, it wouldn’t be easy, I haven’t done it.  The guy or guys who did this really had their shit together, and Edwards wasn’t a small guy.  I don’t think he’d been in a fight in his life, but he worked out; he wouldn’t be easy to bring down.”  

Stephens seemed fascinated by this insight while the second orderly just grimaced and took a step away from Jacobs.  I made a similar face at my brewing coffee.  

“Dude, you have thought about this way too much.  How do I know you’re not just bragging?”

Again, Jacobs laughed.  “If I was bragging, I’d be bragging.  I have an alibi.  I was at the shooting range all day yesterday.”  That stunned silence actually got me to drop my pretense of making coffee and join in.  Apparently, none of them had even seen me in the room until that point.  Stephens eyed me nervously, like I cared what drugs he’d been doing compared to everything Jacobs had said.  I might still report Stephens, but only if he endangered a patient.  Jacobs, on the other hand, gave me a sideways glance and a friendly nod as if he hadn’t just managed to make me even more disturbed by him.  

The second orderly had his back to me, and apparently missed the other’s glances.  “Then, as you have so much insight about this, who do you think killed or kidnapped him?”

Jacobs shrugged.  “I don’t really know, The guy didn’t seem to have many enemies, unless somebody was driven to murder by all his talk about his happy family.  I’d bet he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, either that or somebody had reason to kidnap a doctor, he was one of the best here.  I think he was in the news for that a while back, right?  He developed some revolutionary technique to excise brain tumors?”

The orderly I didn’t know shook his head.  “No, that was Richardson, but he’s on vacation in Switzerland until January.  Edwards saved that Australian billionaire everyone else had said was terminal.  The guy with brain cancer.”

Jacobs waved him off.  “Whatever, I knew it was something about saving people with tumors.  The point is, that’s my theory.”

“That sounds like this was someone actively seeking to kidnap a doctor.  What makes you think that’s the case?”  It made sense, there weren’t many other reasons to kidnap a doctor like Edwards when there were so many people who’d be much easier to abduct.  I just wanted to know his reasoning.  Maybe he’d seen something, or maybe he was somehow involved in this.  

The second orderly turned to look back at me long enough that I could read his name tag.  Rivers.  Jacobs replied before he could say anything.  

“If this was personal, why not abduct him from home, or somewhere a bit less public, at least?  And if it wasn’t, why Edwards?  The guy got in the news, it makes sense that that would be the reason somebody would want him.”

Stephens spoke up as if he’d just remembered something, “What kind of guys take a doctor?  I mean, I did see some shady dudes hanging around yesterday, but I’d seen two of them here before, so I didn’t think anything of it.”

“You know,” I remarked, “having seen them around before shouldn’t make them less suspicious.  If anything, that suggests that they staked the place out beforehand.”

Jacobs nodded, “My thoughts exactly,—” now I wasn’t so pleased with my statement, even if we were both right.  It was a little disturbing to feel like I’d impressed that psychopath.  “— when had you seen them before?  What were they doing?”  

“Well, I…”  He glanced nervously at me and Rivers.  

Jacobs cut in before either of us could speak, “I really doubt anybody gives a rat’s ass what you were smoking, just tell us what you saw.”

Stephens hesitated a second longer, but I guess his fear of Jacobs won out.  “…I was getting high out back and, well, it was sort of dark, so I guess these guys thought nobody would see ‘em back there.  They were talking sort of quiet, and they looked normal, I guess, they just seemed kinda shady to me.”

“What were they talking about?”  It was Jacobs asking, though I’d been about to ask the same question.  

Stephens shrugged.  “No idea, it was some other language.  Like Spanish, I guess, but harsher.  They were both kinda ripped, they had that gang look to them, and they wore a lot of the same colors.  I saw some other, bigger guys with the same colors yesterday as well, just earlier in the day.”

“Like when Edwards vanished?”

Stephens nodded.  

Jacobs looked at me like he thought we were thinking the same thing, and maybe we were, but I had no idea.  Ignoring my confusion at his glance, he turned back to Stephens, “What colors were they wearing?”

“Red, black, and brown.  The one guy had, like, biker gloves or something, he looked like he was dressed for some kind of sport.  Maybe rugby?”

I interjected before Jacobs this time, “That language they spoke, any chance it was Latin?”  He stared blankly and I quoted the first thing I could think of, which happened to be “I see the better way and approve it, but I follow the worse way.”  Jacobs frowned at me curiously.  

Not knowing what I said, Stephens nodded.  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was it.  That was what they were speaking.”

Emily stopped by to get coffee and derailed what I had started to see as an investigation.  

“Jeez!  Don’t any of you have work to be doing?”

Stephens and Rivers rushed back to their jobs before she could tell Julie, Jacobs knew he was too good at his job to be fired over this, so he blatantly ignored her.  I, on the other hand, had come to accept that Emily seemed incapable of acknowledging my existence and thus continued making my coffee as if she’d never walked in.  I had ten more minutes left in my break anyway.  I wondered if there was anything I could do, if the Legion needed a doctor, maybe they hadn’t killed Edwards yet, maybe I could mount a rescue?  Then again, I was also a doctor, if they had killed him, I might be providing an easy replacement.  He was probably dead by now either way.  

I’d really hoped that Jacobs had quelled his interest in the matter and would let me drink my coffee in peace without any further creepy grins, but no, he approached me once he managed to get the vending machine to produce a can of some noxious-looking energy drink. He leaned against the counter beside me.  

“You `take the worse path’?  What exactly are you planning?”

“Nothing.  That was just the first Latin I could think of.”

He gave me a sideways stare.  “You sure about that?  You look like you’re plotting something.  These guys are Legion, from the sound of it.  They’re the kind of bad news even _I_ try not to fuck with.”

“Why do you think I’m planning something?”  As creepy as he was, I half thought that Jacobs was a Legion spy, and even now that he’d said that I couldn’t rule it out.  

He shrugged, grinned, and sipped his drink.  “Because you’re idealistic to the point of stupidity and you’re smart and tough enough to think you might stand a chance.”

I stared at him blankly.  Was I that easy to read?  Now he was even more disturbing.  

Jacobs nodded, “That and the Deagle you’re always hiding.  You’re pretty damn moral for a guy who’s probably broken more laws than I have, and that’s a recipe for vigilante justice right there.”  I glanced at Emily.  She was across the room with headphones in and either she hadn’t heard or she was a very good actor.  

“How can you tell…?” I sighed, “Whatever.  You’re not changing my mind, and I should get back to work.”  I finished my coffee and turned to leave.  

“At least be careful,” Jacobs called after me, “You’re dealing with the fucking _Legion_ , and if they kill or enslave you, these folks will probably hire another idiot like Emily here and I’ll have to deal with them.”

*       *       *

Now that I’d changed my plans a bit, the painting came together easily.  I had it finished already and set aside while I worked on a new one.  Once again, my mind had sunk into a frantic cycle of concern and contemplation.  That ridiculous idea I’d had would not go away and now the question was not if but who.  This idea had brought me back to the simple fact that, sooner or later, I had to choose between Vulpes and Arcade.  The latter would be the safer, and simpler choice, so long as he never found out the extent of my involvement with the Legion or my questionable morality.  Vulpes, on the other hand, would put me in danger one way or another even if I had started to trust that he wasn’t going to kill me intentionally.  I’d been living my whole life in constant danger and that wasn’t going to change, besides, Vulpes knew everything about me and accepted that.  If anything, his job made my corruption a necessity, I’d probably have to become even more okay with the Legion to stay with him.  

As usual, my thoughts drove me to paint, in this case resulting in an abstract piece of predominantly red and black with shadows and shapes, some human, some canine.  I didn’t need to focus too much for the figures to form, some did so without my conscious intention to create them, so I paid more attention to my thoughts while I worked and listened to music.  

I hadn’t heard from Vulpes since we’d left him unconscious and flown to Scotland.  Vulpes had been long gone when we’d returned.  Alerio had left a note thanking us but no information beyond that.  I hadn’t seen him or gotten a call and with the newspaper gone, I had no way of knowing that he was even alive.  Deep down, I knew he might well be dead even if I couldn’t accept that possibility.  I didn’t want to believe that he was dead and that was probably why after two weeks I half expected him to waltz in through the painting in the bathroom, like he had that first time I’d seen him.  This was Vulpes Inculta, he couldn’t die from something so trivial as infection.  

My hand started to hurt and I set my brush down, cracking my knuckles and stepping back to examine my work.  I really needed to use lighter colors.  As if preying on the fact that I couldn’t stand still when I wasn’t painting or writing, my playlist switched from a bagpipe rendition of Amazing Grace to something much more dance-able: Judas.  It was also preying on the fact that Lady Gaga, along with AC/DC and Madonna, was one of my favorite musicians.  

In public, I was afraid to dance.  In private, I cut loose, or at least as much as I could without fearing that I was going to knock over my paintings.  I felt like I’d gotten a bit better when I wasn’t trying to match set steps, more accurately I was better at dancing like a stripper than like the Scottish lord that I was.  Not to say I actually stripped, but the bump and grind style came a lot more naturally than the deliberate and dignified dance steps steeped in tradition from the days of ancient nobility.  

My short hair probably reduced the effect a bit, but I liked to think that I made up for it with the way I used my hips.  I turned up the music as I got more into the song and would have shut my eyes if not for the wet paint all around me.  I hadn’t heard Arcade get home yet and with him working a different shift, I didn’t know when he’d be back.  Between that knowledge and the way I was dancing, I started to hope that Vulpes would come in, ideally fully recovered, maybe in a nice suit or just that entertaining leather-kilt thing he had on Halloween…  

I danced back into a hand on my hip that startled me much less than it should have.  I still turned around, spinning into the man I assumed was Vulpes.  

It was Arcade.  I only hesitated for a fraction of a second, but it was enough that he noticed and frowned.  

“Were you expecting someone else to walk in here and put their hand on your waist?”

Oh, shit.  “No,” _think, Jack, think…_   “I was just…thinking.”  Thinking?  I _had_ been thinking, but that was nowhere near a good enough lie, especially given the truth of what I’d been thinking about.  His expression conveyed something too close to suspicion for me to leave it at that.  “I was fantasizing.”

That expression shifted to one of mild surprise.  He seemed to believe me, I hoped.  

“Oh.”

In the awkward pause that followed, the song changed to something even more dance-able than Judas, or at least better suited for a slow dance.  It was from an old movie, though the name of the song escaped me.  I felt as relieved for the opportunity to distract Arcade as for the end of the musical reminder of my own duplicity.  In most cases, I’d have presumed that my lie precluded further questions, but given our relationship, I couldn’t chance that.  It was better that I distract him before he had that chance.  

I did my best to stand a little more seductively.  “Do you dance?”

He grinned.  “A gay man who likes classic literature and old movies?  Of course I dance.”  

~       ~       ~

Of course one thing led to another and soon enough it was dawn.  We lay in bed with him partly on top of me and both of us exhausted, although my mind had become much too active for sleep.  He seemed to notice that.  

“Are you alright?”

No, I’m trying to decide between you and the murderous frumentarius who keeps breaking in to sleep with me and I also have an idea I may or may not go through with that I only decided to try because I keep almost dying.  Of course, I didn’t say all that.  “I’m fine.  Why?”

He narrowed his eyes and sighed.  “Jack, I know you too well to believe you right now.  Something’s on your mind and it’s probably something serious, but you’re going to keep it to yourself until you can’t anymore and then someone, be it you, or someone else, is going to have an emotional breakdown and possibly all hell will break loose.  What is it?”

“I’m just thinking.  It’s nothing, really.”

He gave me that look again.  When I stayed silent, he sighed again.  “Alright, Jack.  Just, please, don’t keep bottling everything up when it’s the kind of thing you need to talk about.”

“This isn—”  Well, I guess it kind of was, it just wasn’t something I could talk about with him.  Or anyone, for that matter.  “—’t like that.”  

There was that look again.  “Very convincing.”  He ran a hand through his hair and sat up, drawing himself into a more comfortable position on the bed.  “Just try not to upset yourself, okay?  You seem to be doing a lot better now and I hope I’m right about that.”

I snorted.  “Are you saying that as my doctor or my boyfriend?”  I wanted to steer things in a lighter direction so I wouldn’t feel so bothered by his concern for me, but Arcade wasn’t going to let that happen.  He gave me that worried stare that made his bay-green eyes resemble Turing’s.  The dog was asleep on Rex’s bed in the corner, so silent that I hadn’t even seen him there, and his own dark gaze matched Arcade’s perfectly.  At least I’d still have my dog after all this.  Vulpes seemed to like dogs.  

“Jack, I really care about you, probably more than I should, considering we’ve only known each other for a few months.  I…  You weren’t in a good state of mind when we met, and I never want to see you like that again, even if things don’t work out between us.”  He said that _now_ , he might eat his words later.  “I’m just concerned.  _I’ve_ been through a lot, being with you, I’m sure it must have been worse for you going through all of that.”

It felt like he was building to something here, and that worried me.  My first thought was that he planned to break-up with me, my second followed the same idea, being that he’d somehow discovered that I was sleeping with Vulpes willingly, but he seemed too calm for that.  My third thought was that he’d had the same crazy idea that I’d had.  

They were all wrong.  

“My parents were in the C.I.A.”

I stared.  “…what?”

“My parent’s were in the C.I.A.,” he continued, “And so were Daisy, Johnson, Kreiger, Moreno, and Doc Henry.”  

“Oh.  That explains a lot.”  Actually, I’d half suspected as much, I was more amazed that he’d told me.  That bothered me more than the puppy-dog stare; he trusted me enough to tell me this and he didn’t seem to trust easily.  This seemed like some kind of major commitment for him and not that I was opposed to commitment, it was just that I’d thought I’d decided which of them I would choose and now I wasn’t so sure.  He’d finally opened up to me, between that and the concern he was showing, I found I couldn’t go through with the break-up I’d had planned.  He was just too sweet, and although Vulpes could be sweet in his own way, this was…different.  

He sat there awkwardly for a few moments, probably figuring that I was processing what he’d just told me, although I wasn’t.  When the silence reached the five minute mark, he glanced at the clock.  “Well, it’s six in the morning and I should really get some sleep, we both should.”

I nodded and lay back down, rolling over to snuggle against him.  I don’t think he’d expected that reaction.  

It bothered me that I’d changed my mind; I wasn’t the kind of man who went back once I’d decided something.  Doing that made things complicated and it took me long enough to make the decision in the first place.  I guess my only consolation was Vulpes’ absence, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and if I could keep Arcade ignorant of what I had been doing, maybe this relationship wasn’t as doomed as I’d thought. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think we all know the song I named this for.   
> The doctors are those unnamed Follower's doctors and likewise the orderlies are the Follower's guards. Their names were mostly randoms although Steigman's is a reference to an obscure TV show while the personalities of Edwards and Jacobs are based on characters in a different show. The references and characters were just to serve the purpose of getting Arcade to investigate the Legion.


	38. King of Wishful Thinking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It seems like Jack's choice might have been made for him, but not in the way he expects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another shortish chapter and hopefully the next one will be finished soon as well. This indecisiveness will end soon, I promise. XD Also, chapter title from the song of the same name, and we finally see what it is that Jack's been planning.

——————CHAPTER 38 (King of Wishful Thinking)——————

I like to think that at least deep down I usually recognized when I was making a bad decision.  Granted, most of my bad decisions were a bit more drastic than this one, although I guess drastic was relative.  Usually, my bad decisions were stuff like doing the things I had nightmares about to see if they actually happened, and trying to kill myself, and dating pretty much anyone I’d ended up dating.  Admittedly, that last example hadn’t ended up killing anyone yet in the latter two cases, but all the rest had or very nearly had led to at least one death.  Hopefully this latest decision, rash and stupid though it was, would not end up killing anyone involved.  

Although I’d lose no sleep if the sole casualty was this obnoxious salesman.  

The typical “Are you looking for anything specific” was expected, but when I answered yes and refused to elaborate, I’d hoped he’d take a hint.  But no, he persisted, though I guess that was my just desserts for going into a high-end jewelry store while wearing my blue diamond earrings and several expensive necklaces.  I’d felt like dressing up, considering I was actually leaving my house for a change, and as a result I might have actually looked like the sort of guy who lived where I did.  The salesman and his manager certainly recognized that I had money, but unfortunately for them, I didn’t impulse shop for jewelry.  I was here for one or maybe two things.  Well, one, really.  If I bought two, I’d use one and the other would sit in a sock drawer reminding me that I was an indecisive asshole.  Well, technically I could use two, but that sort of thing would involve religious conversion and moving to some place where that was legal, if it was legal anywhere.  If they even agreed to it.  They might not agree even if I just picked one, both was completely impossible.  Even as it was, this was still a ridiculous idea.  

“Our Elegance collection features the finest black pearls…” he changed trailed off as I walked past the display he’d been describing, rushing forward to advertise the next thing he thought I might be looking at.  “All these watches are inlaid with mother of pearl and…”  I kept walking and he dashed to the next display case.  “These white gold earrings are…”  If I wasn’t actually hoping to get home on foot before Arcade returned from work, I might have kept wandering the store a while longer, just listening to the salesman frantically advertise in a hopes of finding something I’d want.  I hadn’t felt like dealing with people today, so I hadn’t bother to engage him politely, besides, I got the feeling that this guy would take a polite refusal to hear him extoll the value of everything I didn’t want as a sign that he could talk me into buying all of it.  The salesman gave one last almost pleading offer as I found the display case I’d come here to look through.  “A simple silver ring?”

I actually looked him in the eye on that one and glimpsed a trace of hope and greed before his manager thankfully stepped in.  The woman was all business, professional, in a black and white, suit.  She reminded me of my mother except this woman was much older, easily in her seventies.  She dismissed the salesman with a nod and focused on me.  “You aren’t here to browse.  You’re here for an engagement ring, aren’t you?”  Buying this from a woman who reminded me of my mother made the experience even more unnerving.  I had to count the number of times I’d nearly died lately to keep myself from giving up on this ill-conceived venture.  It didn’t help when another salesperson, this one a woman who apparently had nothing better to do, overheard the E-word.  She practically fluttered over to us before I’d even told the manager she was right.  

The manager, Alice, according to her name-tag, gestured at the case in front of me.  “These are our engagement rings.  Are you looking for any specific metal or gemstone?  Diamond, of course, is traditional.”  

I’d been thinking about little else for the past few weeks and yet now that I was here, I realized that this kind of question had never occurred to me.  It would probably be best to pick something that either of them would hopefully be fine with, although my taste in jewelry for anyone except myself was completely untested.  Simple was probably good, ideally something that would hopefully double as a wedding band.  

“Uh…silver.  Something simple.”

The saleswoman piped up while Alice got out a few examples.  “Who _is_ the lucky girl?  College girlfriend?”  I hardly had to look at her to know that she was romanticizing this.  It was the kind of young-love cliche that I played to with some of my writing, even if my books tended more towards kinky than romantic.  Maybe it was just because of last night, but I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t decided who I would propose to yet and of my two paramours, I thought of Arcade first.  

“Not exactly,” I saw all the rings Alice had retrieved— a fairly wide variety— but they were all too feminine and I shook my head, “he’s a man, and I’m actually a bit younger than him.”  

Alice hesitated while seeking a new series of rings to show me.  She looked up like she planned to kick me out, but her gaze flicked to my clearly expensive earrings and she reconsidered.  To her credit, the saleswoman was unfazed, if not even more vicariously overjoyed, although I heard her male counterpart grumble something behind me.  A few months ago, I would have fled, or never admitted that in the first place.  Maybe I was just becoming more bold, but looking around at these people, the manager who seemed like a snobbish bitch, the obnoxiously greedy salesman, and the saleswoman who seemed nice, if a bit dumb, I really didn’t care what these people thought of me.  If they had kicked me out of their store, well, that sucked for them, because they’d lost a very wealthy customer.  I was glad they hadn’t, but wasn’t so sure I’d be coming back; Alice just seemed like the kind of woman who beat the competition with mafia wielding cricket bats.  Or, more likely, assault rifles.  

Rolling with that revelation out of the blatant desire to make a sale, Alice showed a series of simple silver wedding bands that were much closer to what I’d been looking for.  I bought one before the saleswoman could further romanticize my life and I left.  

~       ~      ~

Having the ring didn’t mean I’d decided.  I still wasn’t sure and mostly I was just afraid that Vulpes would show up as soon as I chose Arcade, or worse: Vulpes was gone.  The idea that he was dead made me want to choose him, but of course, if that was the case, my choice had already been made for me.  I still held out hope, at least for a few days, thinking maybe he’d return.  I don’t know if I planned to propose if he broke in again, I still couldn’t decide between them, but I did decide that if he didn’t show up in the next three days I would have to believe that he was dead, or that for some reason he’d left and didn’t intend to come back.  Arcade’s schedule remained diurnal, meaning that my own sleep schedule became something more normal and I usually painted all day until he got home.  With my housekeeping skills, the division of labor tended more towards me paying for things while he cooked and cleaned when he had time.  I’d told him more than once that, with my savings and royalties, he could really quit his job, but I guess he felt like he had to help people.  The guy was practically a saint and right now I couldn’t decide if that made me love him more or if I thought it was dangerously stupid.  With the Legion, sooner or later his need to protect people would turn agains them, and I’d like to get him out of here before that.  If he’d quit, we could move back to Scotland or buy a boat or something, but as it was I just had to distract him.  Up until now, my methods of distraction had ranged from conversation to sex, mostly the latter, but there had been no sign of Vulpes and three days had passed, so tonight I hoped to ensure that the Legion didn’t so much as cross Arcade’s mind for at least a week.  I had the ring in my pocket and for once, after much trial and error, I’d cooked a meal on my own.  Actually, it had turned out much better than I’d expected; my mother would have been proud.  I wasn’t sure what he’d think of the cliche, but I had candles around to light, although I guess the dim lighting of my house sort of provided the same feel.  Everything was ready, now I just had to wait an hour until he got home.  

In the meantime, I hoped to finish my latest painting.  To the average person, it seemed to be a landscape, a pastoral scene of sheep fields in the Highlands, but it had taken on a slightly different nature to me.  For a long time I’d planned to represent Arcade as a ram, but that didn’t quite work.  He was too intelligent for that, and his protective nature seemed more important than his apparent harmlessness.  He wasn’t the obvious subject of the painting; Rather than make a portrait, this _was_ a landscape, with no people, and no animals, aside from the bush-like sheep and one very tall, pale sheepdog.  I’d placed him at a point of focus, an intersection of lines and curves that led the eye to him so that, although he was not the obvious focus of the painting, or even looking at the viewer, he became critically important.  

The painting made me think of Arcade even more than I had already been thinking about him.  I really didn’t know if he’d saw yes, this was a rash decision and he probably knew that as well, but if he didn’t, I doubted that he’d break up with me.  More likely he’d just try to persuade me to wait and that conversation might turn the other way, letting me talk him into it regardless.  There were a lot of things I hadn’t thought about yet and, considering them, I started pacing.  I was listening to music so, of course, pacing became dancing and dancing became, due to the slower song, a one-man waltz.  I hadn’t really considered anything beyond the proposal.  The wedding would have to be small, there weren’t too many people either of us knew to invite.  We’d have to go through the legal stuff of the marriage, and moving somewhere, and maybe changing names.  What happened if the lord of a clan changed his name when he got married?  Would Arcade want to be a MacLean, and if so, how the hell would the tall American fit in with Scottish nobility.  Not that it mattered, I was hardly loved by my fellow nobles.  

Those thoughts gave way to wondering what Arcade would look like in a suit.  I mean, I’d seen him in business wear, but in a tux, it could go either way.  He might clean up nice, or he could be the sort of guy who just looked awkward in formalwear.  He looked adorable when he was awkward.  

For the second time in less than a week, my thoughts and dancing were interrupted by a hand on my waist.  This hand was followed by another grasping my own and a very familiar man joining my waltz.  “Why exactly were you in a jewelry store?”


	39. One Thing Leads to Another

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vulpes is back! And a nosy neighbor leads Jack to a dilemma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is a song name, as usual. I think this one's by Fixx? It's one I'm less familiar with. And hey, Vulpes is not dead! ^w^

——————CHAPTER 39 (One Thing Leads to Another)——————

That gravely voice made me trip.  “Vulpes!”  I jostled a table behind me and nearly crashed into one of my finished paintings, but he caught me.  The wound that might have killed him had apparently healed, because he held me easily.  He wore dark slacks and a plain white shirt, probably intending to go unnoticed on his way here.  If he had a scar or any remaining trace of his injury, I couldn’t see it through the fabric.  

His lips curved in the ghost of a grin.  “Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”  He paused suddenly, looking down the street as if something had caught his eye.  I hadn’t lit any candles in my studio and the sun was setting, leaving us hidden to anyone outside while the street remained plainly visible to us.  

“Arcade will be back in an hour, if not more,” I assured him.  “He usually runs late.”

“It’s not Arcade I’m worried about…”  He seemed to see what he’d been looking for.  “Go downstairs and answer the door if it rings.”

I frowned at him, hoping for more explanation, but he waved me towards the stairs and I knew he wasn’t going to elaborate.  In a house filled with the scent of seasoned steak, vegetables, and chocolate cake, and currently lit mostly by candles, I didn’t exactly embrace the idea of guests, and I had no idea who Vulpes had seen except maybe Daisy?  He’d implied that someone would ring the doorbell, so it wasn’t Arcade, and another Legion man would probably just break in, so it was someone potentially friendly with myself or Arcade.  Veronica?  Raul?  Cass?  Daisy still seemed the most likely, but if so, why did Vulpes seem concerned?  I could just tell her Arcade wasn’t home and it was a bad time— given the candlelight, she’d probably make assumptions and be willing to leave.  

The doorbell rang and on the doorstep, I found one of the last people I’d expected.  Craig Boone stood in the doorway, wearing a thin t-shirt and camo pants and looking exceptionally military.  With those dark aviators, I felt like I was being interrogated.  “Uh, can I help you?”  

I couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed to glance around and conclude that there was no one around to overhear us.  “Are you alone?”

Well, the creep factor just skyrocketed.  Vulpes had followed me downstairs after the doorbell rang, any sound he might have made masked by both dogs that now stood by my feet, eyeing Boone curiously.  Vulpes had stepped behind the partly open door and he stood there, listening, the only reason aside from my disregard for my own safety that I wasn’t more cautious about Boone.  I glimpsed a nod from Vulpes and followed suit, answering Boone.  “Yeah, why?”

“Good.”  Boone glanced around again.  “Do you know that you’re being watched by the Legion?”

Avoiding the instinct to make a joke, I feigned ignorance.  “Really?”  I moved to lean out the doorway and look around, but Boone gestured to stop me.  “I don’t see them here right now, but I’ve seen people watching your house pretty often.  What do you know about the Legion?”

He figured I was working against them because I’d showed him who’d sold his wife.  Had Vulpes planned this all along?  Was this the only reason he’d even stopped by?

I wasn’t sure how I should answer Boone.  I shrugged.  “I know a few things about them.  Why?”

I could feel his eyes narrow even behind the sunglasses.  “Because ever since you arrived, you’ve been connected to the Legion in one way or another.  I looked through the papers.  Why are they watching you?”

Leaving out the whole thing between me and Vulpes, the truth seemed like the best answer.  “Well, I have a lot of money, but mostly I’d say I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I got lost when I got here and ended up in a bar in the bad part or town, and I guess I found their headquarters or something?”  It was sort of their headquarters, I’d seen the man that Vulpes claimed he worked for and I got the vibe that Vulpes was pretty high up the chain of command himself.  

Boone looked stunned.  “You found the Legion’s headquarters?”

I nodded.  

“By _accident_?”

It was the most emotion I’d ever heard from the man.  “Well, I’ve also found a grizzly in Muir Woods and narrowly survived three very bad car wrecks and more than one plane crash.  Don’t stand near me in a thunderstorm.”

Vulpes moved slightly and I got the sense that he was fighting the urge to laugh.  

Boone seemed remarkably unfazed, or else my chattiness just annoyed him.  Someone was walking on the stairs, a tourist, judging from the camera in her hands, but she made Boone nervous.  “We should talk inside.  I need to know where you found this.  Why do you think it’s their headquarters?”

At another nod from Vulpes, I led Boone inside and was halfway to the living room when the door closed behind us.  I admit, I had expected Vulpes to do something about the over-inquisitive soldier, I just hadn’t thought through what that entailed.  

When the door shut, it left the hallway almost completely in shadow so that, for several seconds, none of us could see each other and Vulpes took that time to act.  

*       *       *

I heard Boone turn to face me when I closed the door.  I suspected he carried his knife but not his rifle— though the latter was useless in such close proximity— and although I couldn’t be sure, he had probably drawn it.  That was fine.  I was not unarmed myself.  

Before our eyes adjusted, he would be on the defensive and he might even expect me to wait, but that would sacrifice my advantage.  My initial strike was intended to locate him rather than to do damage, but I felt my machete cut deep, possibly to bone and something hit the ground.  As my eyes adjusted, I discovered he’d dropped his knife when my machete had cut his forearm.  He was bleeding badly, badly enough that I might have nicked an artery, but that didn’t stop him.  Unarmed, Boone rushed forward in an attempt to tackle me.  

I didn’t manage to dodge fast enough.  

Boone pinned me against the door, his good arm pressed against my throat.  I’d tried to stab him, but he’d struck my blade aside as he’d charged, knocking the machete from my hand.  He started to press his weight against my neck and I knew I’d suffocate if I didn’t get him off me fast.  

He’d pinned me to the door so that my feet barely reached the ground, letting me grab his arm and use his own weight to hold me in place while I brought both feet up for a kick that knocked him onto his back.  Both my boots connected with his jaw and I half expected to have snapped his neck, but I must have been too hasty to perfect my aim.  

*      *       *

The fight was over before I had more chance to intervene, my dogs hadn’t even started barking and now they looked from Boone to Vulpes as if both men had completely lost their minds.  Granted, Turing at least wasn’t used to brawls in the foyer.  With Boone unmoving, I grabbed the nearest thing I could think of and set about restraining him while Vulpes coughed and struggled to catch his breath.  I was surprised that he hadn’t passed out, but then again, this was Vulpes.  I’d expected his kick to break Boone’s neck, but it hadn’t.  The kick had fractured and probably dislocated Boone’s jaw and the burly man might have cracked a few teeth, but he would have been conscious if the back of his skull hadn’t slammed into the hardwood floor.  He was also bleeding very badly.  

While Vulpes recovered and got back to his feet, I cleaned, stitched and bandaged the cut to Boone’s arm.  

When Vulpes could breathe again, he turned on a light and frowned at me.  There were quite a few reasons that he could be giving me that look.  Luckily he voiced his question.  

“Fuzzy handcuffs?”  

I glanced back at Boone’s wrists.  “They were the only binding handy.”

He shook his head in amusement.  “And you bothered to bandage his arm?”  He didn’t say anything, but for a change he let his tone suggest another question.  I’d barely glanced at him before tending to Boone instead.  

“You’ve survived much worse easily.  I figured you were fine.  Besides, he was bleeding all over the rug.”

He chuckled.  “I’m flattered you think I am so invincible.”

“…Why didn’t you contact me?  At least tell me you weren’t dead after all of that?”

Vulpes seemed tense.  “The Legion has become somewhat unpleased with my performance lately.  I have been trying not to give them any further fuel against me.”

“Are you alright?”

He waved away my question.  “You are in far more danger than I am.  Your family’s castle is rightfully yours now, it might be wise to return home.”  

A thought occurred to me, but I dismissed it in favor of voicing a different question.  “Do you _want_ me to leave?”  It had occurred to me that he might have been responsible for the crash that killed my mother, whether out of a desire to grant me her inheritance or out of some misguided desire to protect me from her.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to consider that awful possibility.  

He stayed silent for a long time, during which I had to glance at the clock and wonder what Arcade would think if he found us all like this.  

“I want you to be safe,” Vulpes replied vaguely.  

“Safe from the Legion?”

He nodded.  

“What about you?”

“I can handle myself.”

“From the Legion?”  He seemed slightly annoyed, so I continued.  “I know you’re very very good, but there’s a lot of them and you’re working with them right now, so they probably know where you sleep.  Aren’t you a bit more vulnerable to them than most people?  And if they’re already unhappy with you, aren’t you in danger?  Are you any more safe than I am?”

He gave me a stare that suggested he knew that.  He had my best interests in heart.  Now I really wasn’t sure which of them I loved more.  He’d changed my mind yet again, and while Arcade had just admitted a very deep secret he kept, Vulpes was risking his life for me.  I might have proposed right then, if not for the unconscious Boone ruining the mood.  

“What do we do with him?”

Vulpes seemed surprised that I’d asked.  I guess he realized that I didn’t exactly have experience with this sort of thing because he shrugged and pointed out.  “He knows too much.  The safest choice might be to kill him, but body disposal has become difficult lately, the police have grown wise to many of our tactics.  I could return him to the Legion as a slave, although he’d have to be rendered mute.”

I found it unsettling how little the choice bothered me at the time.  “Mute’s better than dead.  Do you need help getting him there?”

“It would be best if we were not seen together.”  He grinned and took out his phone.  

With the blood on the floor and the disarrayed rugs, I had enough to clean up before Arcade returned and I did that to the best of my ability while Vulpes waited for his men and helped himself to a sandwich from my fridge.  Apparently, the rest of the Legion were under the impression that he’d just left to eat.  

Alerio and another frumentarius took Boone away after the sun had set and Vulpes lingered for a moment to talk to me more.  “When we met, I asked what or whom you were loyal to.  Has that changed?”

I really wasn’t sure.  After a moment I just shrugged and when he seemed to want more of an answer, I explained.  “I don’t know.  I could be loyal to you, or Arcade, or maybe the Legion, but that last one doesn’t seem like such a good idea right now and I can’t really be loyal to you or Arcade without… well, without choosing between you.”

Another awkward pause.  “And you have not chosen.”

If he wasn’t so enigmatic, maybe I could tell if he was disappointed that I hadn’t chosen him or that I hadn’t made the safer choice.  Or maybe he was just annoyed by how indecisive I was.  I wished I could have said something to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t think of anything, at any rate I certainly wasn’t proposing now.  

Vulpes turned and left.  I didn’t remember what he’d asked when he’d arrived and he didn’t ask again.  

 


	40. Warning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arcade starts to figure things out and annoys Vulpes.

Vulpes’ return had left me undecided yet again, so I spent the next fifteen minutes blowing out and hiding all the candles.  Dinner was a reasonable enough gesture and I couldn’t very well hide the fact that I’d cooked, but if Arcade had seen everything I’d set up, he’d probably draw conclusions I didn’t want drawn.  Luckily, he was running late.  

He explained while we ate.  Even without a major disaster, today had apparently been a crappy day filled with several fairly disgusting emergencies (he thankfully spared the details) and one child caught in an explosion that destroyed the main train line in the city.  The kid had apparently been close to death when he’d arrived but had survived the ride in and a surgery to remove shrapnel from his chest, so everyone or at least Arcade had dared to hope he might live and after seven grueling hours they’d been proved wrong.  It was probably a good thing that I’d decided not to propose today.  

After all of that I let him steer things in whatever direction he wanted and we ended up watching old movies late into the night.  I’d only seen him upset when things happened to me, so I’d expected him to be more visibly distressed by what he’d dealt with today, but that wasn’t the case.  Rather than open emotion he just got very quiet.  He seemed almost resigned, or maybe solemn was a better word.  I guess he dealt with this kind of thing more often than he’d let on, but I hadn’t expected him to deal with grim realities this calmly.  Maybe I should have figured this out about him sooner.  It struck me that the only real difference was that I’d been directly involved whenever he’d panicked.  Right now, I still felt more wooed by the way Vulpes was basically risking his life for me, but it was still pretty charming that Arcade felt so concerned for me.  Even if I was probably going to stab him in the back.  Metaphorically, I mean.  

*       *      *

We must have fallen asleep towards the end of Singing in the Rain because I found myself waking up on the couch several hours after the last time I’d checked the clock.  Jack, who’d been sitting beside me, was nowhere to be seen and the TV was off, though it turned itself off on its own a while after any movie ended, so that proved nothing.  The house was absolutely silent except for a distant clatter of dog claws somewhere upstairs.  Figuring that the dogs had followed Jack, and that, at the very least, I should move to sleep on the bed, I headed upstairs.  The house was dark and I didn’t turn on the lights in case Jack was asleep, not that the light would wake him.  I could see well enough by the moonlight though the very sporadic windows.  

I don’t know if it was just habit or if I was actively trying not to wake Jack, though, again, he slept like the dead, but I moved as silently as I could and I was really very good at staying quiet.  _Hiding_ I was terrible at— tall, blonde, and usually dressed in white made me kind of noticeable.  Still, it was probably my stealth that let me remain unnoticed until I opened the bedroom door.  

Jack was asleep, and probably had been for a while, or at least I thought he had.  He lay sprawled on the bed with the blankets mostly disheveled.  Rex was in the corner, unfazed by the goings on in the room while Turing, the dog I had heard, pranced in greeting of the uninvited guest.  

Vulpes Inculta stood beside the bed, and he had the nerve to finish adjusting the blankets over Jack as he heard me open the door.  

“It’s very convenient that you’re awake.”

I narrowed my eyes.  “Uh-huh.”  What was he up to?

Vulpes raised his hands in mock surrender before pulling something out of a bag he was carrying.  “I’m only here to return these to Jack.”

He held a pair of fuzzy handcuffs.  

My frown became an incredulous stare.  “Those are Jack’s?  What—?  _Why_ do you have those?!”

I didn’t miss the slight grin he didn’t bother to conceal.  He set the handcuffs on the bedside table and closed his bag.  “You have already bypassed customs once to reach Scotland.  Wouldn’t it be safer to move there, to avoid anyone who might recognize you based on your past?”

Now I stared for a whole different reason.  What was he getting at?  Was that a threat?  Was he telling me to get lost or was he saying I should get Jack out of the country?  He certainly had no interest in helping me, I’m pretty sure we both knew our hatred was mutual, but it only occurred to me now that he might actually care for Jack.  Albeit in his own sick, abusive way.  

“Riiight.  Because you’ve clearly got everyone’s best interests at heart.”

That grin became a blank stare that was somehow as threatening as a snarl.  “At the moment, I _do._   You would both be wise to leave the country.  Preferably today.”

“ _Why??_   What the hell did you drag us into?!”

“I did no such thing.”

“Bullshit!”

He paused and for a moment I fully expected him to draw a gun.  “If it would not risk upsetting Jack,” he snarled, “I would very much enjoy having you crucified.”

“Believe me, the feeling’s mutual.”  Okay, it wasn’t, nobody deserved crucifixion, but pointing that out wouldn’t have had the same effect.  

We locked eyes for a moment longer before he turned on his heel and stalked out through the bathroom.  

I couldn’t very well hunt him down, and as he’d just reminded me, killing him might push Jack into another emotional crisis.  I wanted the Legion out of my life, particularly this pseudo-Roman rapist murderer terrorist dick and it drove me crazy how powerless I felt about the whole problem.  I yanked all the blankets off the bed and carefully remade it around Jack, hoping that this left no part of the legionary’s work intact.  

Somehow, this managed to wake Jack.  

“Did the sheets insult you?”

“Did you make the bed?”

He frowned, misinterpreting the annoyance in my voice.  “Sorry?”

I sighed and got into bed.  I’d meant it as a serious question; I’d hoped to find out if he hadn’t made the bed at all or if Vulpes might have…done something.  I didn’t want to think about it anymore.  I needed another distraction, so I asked the first thing that came to mind.  

“Have you written anything but romance and erotica?”

He crawled over to hug me while he answered.  “Sure.  I’ve tried almost every genre.  I have a few science fiction, fantasy, crime, drama, and historical books, but I never liked writing those enough for them to sell well.”  He noticed the handcuffs on the table and frowned at them before continuing.  “I’ve written a lot of tragedies too, but never published any.  There’s too much tragedy in the world as it is.”  

“And the world needs more sex?”  

He grinned seductively.  “The world _always_ needs more sex.”

*      *      *

Of course that line went exactly as planned because I was getting very good at using sex as a distraction, not that that hadn’t already been the gist of my entire life; we didn’t say much more until morning.  

I had the same dream I’d been having for weeks, of course.  It was getting to be routine and I was so driven to find some pleasant outcome for it that I doubt my mind could avoid conjuring the same horrible premonition every single time I slept.  

Things were not going well.  For the hundredth, or maybe the thousandth time, my dream ended abruptly.  I heard gunshots, felt a knife in my throat and jolted awake, knowing I’d been killed in the dream.  Was there any way to resolve the situation my dream foretold without somebody I cared about dying?  

*       *       *

I was awake when Jack woke from his nightmare.  I’d been up for almost an hour, I just hadn’t been able to fall back asleep.  I knew better than to try and comfort Jack while he was sleeping and he hadn’t been thrashing around until the very end of his nightmare.  

Besides, right now I wasn’t sure that I was happy with him.  It hadn’t occurred to me last night, but now I was really starting to wonder why Vulpes had fuzzy handcuffs that he said belonged to Jack.  Seeing as Jack hadn’t mentioned them, they probably were his, so the question was why the Legion bastard had had them.  He was probably just messing with me.  But that wasn’t definite.  

It _was_ possible that Jack was sleeping with him willingly, or worse, that Jack was actually helping the Legion.  Fuzzy handcuffs seemed to suggest the former rather than the later, but it didn’t seem likely that he’d get with a frumentarius if he wasn’t at least somewhat okay with the kind of stuff the guy did on a daily basis.  I mean, fuzzy handcuffs were by no means proof positive, and I didn’t want to believe it if I was right on either count, but Jack’s perspective had never been the clearest on a lot of things and with the way his mother had treated him, he might have been drawn into an abusive relationship partly against his will.  I was a afraid I might be right about all of it, but I didn’t want to believe that, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt, as I had been doing far too often lately.  

He’d been having more nightmares lately, even if he was happier in general.  I knew they might have been a reflection of guilt, but I chalked them up to the rapid rise of danger in the city.  He jolted awake from this latest one in a cold sweat.  

*      *      *

Arcade waited a few seconds after I woke up to ask if I was okay and of course, I told him I was.  He still looked concerned, but he seemed to realize that I didn’t want him comforting me every single time I had a nightmare, it was going to happen far too often and I only needed it after the worst ones.  Besides, right now I was more frustrated than upset.  I wanted to paint.  

He got ready for work while I got set up, apparently picking up on my agitation and desire to work out some stress.  He didn’t interrupt me for nearly an hour, and then he waited until I set the brush down to talk.  

“You know the Legion is bad news.”

I frowned at him, playing dumb.  “Yeah?”  Had somebody else caught on to what happened to Boone?  Lord knows, Daisy kept a close eye on us.  “Why are you stating the obvious?”

His brow creased in worry, like when he’d been afraid I might hurt myself.  “Jack, half the people I treat are there because of Legion attacks and that’s only the ones we’re sure are the Legion’s work.  Most of them don’t survive.  Jack, I know you have a way of finding trouble, but I just want you to be safe, alright?  Steer clear of the Legion, please?”

Did he know what had happened with Boone?  Did he know I was sleeping with Vulpes willingly?  “Why do you think I’m involved with the Legion?”

He narrowed his eyes.  Okay, so I guess it was obvious.  

“Jack, I’m not stupid.  You’ve been… you seem a little too okay with… certain things.”  He sighed and rubbed his temples.  He’d been almost angry with me but now his tone switched back to concern, “Look, just be careful, okay?  I don’t know if they’re threatening you or something, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here, but please, just don’t get yourself killed, alright?  I need to get to work.”

He started to leave.  He probably didn’t expect an answer, but I made a point of defying expectations.  “You be careful too, alright?”  Arcade looked back, clearly surprised that I’d bothered to say that and I gave him my most winning smile, even if I probably still looked a little sad, worrying about what I’d been dreaming and how possible that nightmare seemed right now.  “I know you can’t stand what the Legion’s doing, but let the cops handle it.  Don’t get yourself killed, okay?”

He frowned and then smiled a bit uncertainly.  “…Okay.”  

He left, leaving me to freak out about whether he’d just been surprised by my concern or if I’d made him think that I was working for the Legion and trying to keep him from screwing up their plans.  I just wanted him to be safe!  Why did I always screw up this kind of thing?

Okay, this time, at least, it was totally my fault, but still.  For all I know, I might have just provoked him to investigate, and get caught, and worse.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from another Green Day song, which seem to be most of my chapter titles.   
> The next chapter might get really long or it might be very short, I'm still trying to decide where to divide it. If the former ends up being true, it'll probably be a week or so until I finish it, but I may prove myself wrong again.   
> Also, I really love Arcade's reaction after Vulpes leaves. I just have the best mental image of him angrily making the bed. XD


	41. Photograph

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took longer than I expected and I may add more from the next chapter into this one instead.   
> I'm honestly a bit disinterested in this fandom right now, unfortunately, and I feel like it really shows in my writing so I'm going to wait probably a month, maybe more and work on other stories until I feel more interested in writing this again. I am curious to know if anyone agrees that they can see when I'm interested in what I'm writing and when I'm not, I don't know if it's just because I remember what I was feeling at the time or if it's true.   
> I like writing this when I want to write Fallout, though, so I am definitely going to finish it, it just might take a while, I will say that the actions' really going to pick up in the next chapters and I don't want to write that until I can do it justice.

I’d expected to paint all day in the hopes of distracting myself even if it wasn’t working too well, but around noon I was interrupted.  

Turing heard the visitor before I did, probably because of his huge terrier ears, and the little dog hopped up and rushed over to greet him.  I turned in time to discover, to my great surprise, that Vulpes had actually stopped to pet him.  Seeing that I’d noticed his arrival, he got straight to the point.  “Are you already planning to leave the country?”

It didn’t really surprise me that he was asking.  There were lots of reasons that he might be thinking that, though most were just precautions in case the Legion came after me in a more active way.  Most were subtle, so I already suspected that he was here due to the one precaution that most effected him.  Still, I had to be sure.   “Why do you think that?”

“Because you’ve been transferring your money into foreign bank accounts.”

It wasn’t automatically a sign that I planned to move, but he knew I cared less about economic turbulence than making sure I was never broke if I got branded a criminal.  He also had reason to note when a certain American bank account suddenly dropped from half a billion dollars to a few thousand.  I’d had money to spare for a long time and whatever he did, helping Vulpes had seemed like the best way to keep the Legion from killing me at the time.  I’d given Vulpes access to that one account around Thanksgiving; I’d only started transferring funds out of it when he’d disappeared.  He must have investigated and found that I’d also drained my other American accounts.  

“I thought you were dead.”

If he had a reaction to that, he kept it hidden.  “I am not here because you drained the account, I would have suggested you do that anyway, and no one else in the Legion knows the account information, so they will not know that you stopped funding us unless I tell them.  I am merely wondering if you plan to leave and when.”

I shook my head.  “I don’t.  I can’t.  I’m just taking precautions… in case.”

“In case?”

In case the Legion tries to kill me or the American government realize that I’m working with you.  “Just in case.”

He seemed to understand why even if I didn’t say anything.  

“What I do _is_ dangerous and you, by extension, are in danger here.  The doctor may be in even more danger if he does not learn to keep his nose out of Legion business.”

I turned to stare at him and he seemed a little annoyed by how concerned I looked.  “What?  What’s he been doing?”

“He has simply been asking questions about things that are best left alone.”  

I sighed.  I didn’t know what I could do beyond what I’d already tried.  I’d done my best to warn him and I don’t think I could just talk him into moving to Scotland or even taking another vacation.  He was just too damn responsible.  I had to figure out something else and fast or I wouldn’t just be dreaming about blood on my hands.  

Vulpes was still here and I had another question, although I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.  

“How exactly did you spend six million dollars in one week?”

“You can afford it.”

I stared at him.  That slight grin told me I wasn’t getting a more direct answer.  I shook my head and went back to painting.  “I guess I probably don’t want to know.”

*      *      *

Today, at least, went slightly better than the rest of my work week.  Or work month.  Or work year.  Until six I didn’t actually have any interesting patients.  With our alarming shortage of doctors continuing, I’d been given another ER shift.  I had the usual addicts, and the more normal mix of sprained ankles, car accidents, and heart attacks, but nothing at all notable until my shift was nearly over.  

I actually thought that I just might make it through a day without incident when I went to see my last patient.  I knew he was here before I looked at the chart, I’d just hoped that I wouldn’t be the one to deal with him today.  Of course, I’d been wrong.  

I open the door to the exam room where he was waiting, trying to hide my annoyance as much as my disgust as his aura of body odor washed over me.  “Hello, No-Bark.”  To be fair, he was homeless, so I couldn’t hold that against him, but the man was in here practically every day, usually for imagined ailments and the fact that he stank just didn’t help.  

Today he wouldn’t even tell the nurse what was wrong with him.  That usually meant something below the belt, but knowing what I did of him I figured it was more likely a paranoid delusion.  He didn’t leave me in suspense for long.  

“It’s the bull-men, doc.  They’re working with the werewolves, I was keepin’ an eye on them, just to be safe and one of those hairy bastards got me on the leg.  I’ll be howling at the moon quicker than you can say prospectin’!”  As he spoke, he pulled up his pant leg to show a particularly nasty dog bite on his calf.  For once I was more interested in what he’d said.  No-Bark wasn’t the most sane person in the city, but he had a real knack for noticing important things, even if he rarely conveyed them clearly.  

“Are you talking about the Legion?”  I set to work cleaning his wound while he answered.  

“Legion?  What are you talking about?  The bull-men did this, them and their werewolf friends!”  

I sighed.  He _was_ crazy, but his idea of “bull-men” seemed just a little too close to truth to be coincidence.  “What do the bull-men look like?”

They wear dark clothes, at night they put on armor and turn into wolves.  Some still walk on two legs, but they’ll all change soon enough.”  

That sounded like the Legion.  From what he’d been saying, I gathered that No-Bark had been watching the Legion a bit too closely— or, if I was lucky, he’d seen something important— and they’d attacked him, apparently with dogs, unless his whole werewolf story was somehow true.  I bandaged the wound while I kept talking.  “What were they doing?”

“They take people to the docks, they want to eat our hair to grow their horns.  I saw ‘em take two this week!”

“Who’d they take?”  The chance of a lead was a long shot, but I might as well ask.  I wasn’t done bandaging his leg anyway.  

To my great surprise, No-Bark held out a crumpled photograph.  “They took a soldier right off the stairs, and I saw ‘em bring in the guy in this picture.  He dropped it ‘cause they knocked him out.  Don’t know why they took the soldier, he didn’t have much hair…”

I took the picture, but could already guess what it was.  Edwards had always carried a photo of his family, one that he was also in.  That was the picture No-Bark handed me.  

“Do you remember where you saw them?”

*       *        *


	42. So You Think Justice Has a Voice?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arcade gets dragged into a whole new level of trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Slipping" from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog.
> 
> Also, there was going to be a funny little scene with a Roomba in this chapter, but it didn't really fit the tone. I might add it to an earlier chapter instead at some point, I'm not sure. I like the scene, but it just doesn't fit well anywhere. Maybe I'll post it as its own thing.

Jack wasn’t home when I got back from work.  That was strange, but it wasn’t necessarily _bad_ … even if Jack hardly left the house under any circumstances.  Still, he had a right to go outside if he wanted to, maybe he went to the store or just decided to take a walk.  This was Jack, after all, he sometimes got restless.  And he had been restless lately.  He had been _very_ restless lately.  I tried not to think that he might have left to do something with the Legion, or to rendezvous with Vulpes.  Right now I wasn’t sure which was worse.  I wanted to believe that he was just on a walk.  

I’d almost convinced myself of that when the doorbell rang and both dogs flew into a barking frenzy.  I’d already finished cooking and been halfway through dinner when that happened, and I had no idea who to expect.  Most people I knew didn’t drop by unexpectedly and the people Jack knew just barged in.  I thought that maybe Jack had lost his keys when I opened the door to find an extremely distressed James Garret on our doorstep.  

I had _never_ seen him like this.  He had tears in his eyes and it was obvious that he’d actually been crying.  The cloudy sky had begun to rain some time after I’d gotten home (I hadn’t noticed until now) and Garret was absolutely soaked.  He must have walked here, another uncharacteristic truth because the guy normally drove whenever possible, even driving thirteen blocks to avoid a two block walk.  He looked for any excuse to get in his car.  He also liked to keep his appearance neat, putting aside the tear-streaked face and the weather, his grey suit was completely disheveled and it looked like he’d gotten dressed very hastily, his jacket lay unbuttoned, his tie had been knotted wrong, and his fly was open.  One hand fiddled frantically with his watch, rotating it around his wrist in a nervous tick he rarely showed.  I noticed a dark red stain on his palm and the cuff of his suit.  

Garret didn’t give me a chance to speak before he blurted out.  “You still have that gun right?  Did you finally get a new car?”

What on Earth had he gotten himself into?  “Wha— My gun?  Why?  What’s going on?”

“It’s Francine.  She…  We need to …  I…”  He ran a hand through his hair and stared, panting for breath, up the stairs.  He must have run here.  He had a look I’d seen way too many times.  Whatever had happened, he hadn’t really processed it yet, he’d probably run here because it was the first thing he thought of to do and he was now realizing that, for one reason or another, my gun and car wouldn’t help.  It just occurred to me that he’d asked about my car without even considering his own.  

“Is your car alright?”

He frowned for a moment and then nodded.  “Yeah.  It’s…it’s at Gibson’s.”

The rain picked up and I found myself worrying about Jack briefly before beckoning Garrett inside.  Had he even taken a jacket with him?  

“You’re soaked.  Dry off and tell me what happened.  Are you hurt?”  The blood didn’t seem to be his, but I wasn’t sure.  

Garrett was starting to calm down, albeit slowly.  At my invitation, his expression became determined and he shook his head.  “Arcade, it’s Francine.  She’s gone.”

My first thought was that she’d been killed.  I nearly asked that, but managed to stop myself.  If she was only missing, asking if she was dead would just make him more panicked.  “What happened?”

“I was… I was _busy—_ ”

“You were having sex.”  He hadn’t been working and his car was at Gibson’s so I’d already assumed that much, I wasn’t sure if he’d been subtle due to our past relationship or because he blamed himself for whatever had happened to his sister.  I beckoned him inside again, not wanting to be overheard, and this time he followed me into the kitchen.  

Garrett agreed, “Well, yeah, and not very good sex, but I, uh, didn’t hear anything before the gunshot.”

“Someone shot Francine?”

He nodded again, “There was blood behind the bar when I got downstairs, doors were open, but no sign of anyone.”

“Is there anyone who might have wanted her de— hurt?”

“I _know_ she might be…”  He snapped at me and then trailed off and sighed.  “We had some people poking around the bar lately.  I didn’t think…I didn’t think it was anything serious.  I guess I was wrong.”

“What kind of people?”

Garrett shrugged and started vaguely to explain.  

“Legion?”

He nodded.  “Probably.  They wore red and black, all big, buff guys, and two of them carried machetes.”  I paused to think and he continued.  “The Legion’s been kidnapping people from the area for months, it’s gotten really bad lately, but I never thought…”

In retrospect, I think Garrett had probably hoped to avoid the Legion as long as they didn’t cause trouble for his bar, but I’d already heard rumors that the Legion didn’t drink and didn’t tolerate normal bars in their territory.  Some folks said that they worked with a few places that also served booze, so maybe that’s what had Garrett trying to cooperate.  The thing was, he was a little fish by comparison to the places that supposedly had Legion ties.  I’d been looking for what information I could find on them for a while now, even if it had always been clear that I couldn’t take them on directly.  I knew of two restaurants that had Legion ties, but both had been destroyed and the one at least had dwarfed Garrett’s operations.  Aside from that, there was the strip club near where Jack had gotten ambushed, and that club had been connected to organized crime since long before the Legion showed up.  

At the time it _did_ occur to me that Jack had been gone for an awfully long time and, considering the Legion activity in the area….

Whether we were rescuing Francine or Francine and Jack, this would have to be a very careful, very tactical effort.  I wasn’t really the best strategist, but I felt confident that I would do better than Garrett, and he seemed to know that.  He’d calmed down enough that now he just watched me in silent impatience.  

After a moment, James paced over to the window.  A minute later he walked back, scowling.  “Come on, man, you’re smart, and I know you can handle that gun you carry.  Anything could be happening to my sister right now!”

“This is the Legion, we need a good plan, and right now I don’t have one, but I do know where they’re based—”

“Well then tell me and I’ll go myself, I have a small pistol, and maybe I can talk Manny, Cassidy, and Veronica into—”  

“Garrett, think rationally.  This is the Legion, you can’t just charge into their headquarters like that, you’ll get everyone killed!”

“Then what do you suggest?!  The cops?”

“The police already know about this, they have to, and they aren’t doing anything effective.  They’re being paid off or…something.”  I didn’t want to consider that the police were willingly working with the Legion.  I thought for a moment.  “The fewer of us go there, the better, and I have combat training.”

“So does Manny.  And Mick, I think, too.”

I shook my head.  “We need someone to protect the rest of the neighborhood if we’re…  If we don’t come back.”  

He frowned.  “You’re not going to give me some speech about how I’m not cut out for this?”

“You’re not, but I know I can’t talk you out of this.  I know you grew up with Francine and everything.”  The two of them hadn’t really relied on anyone but each other, he’d never told me what really happened, but I got the sense that they didn’t have parents now and had grown up in a bad situation of some kind.  I couldn’t have convinced him to stay out of this by threat of death.  

He nodded in surprise.  “I’m glad you see it that way.  So what’s the plan?”

~       ~       ~

I drove to the Gomorrah.  Showing how upset he still was, Garrett didn’t even comment on my car or suggest that we take his instead.  

I’d left a note for Jack in case I was wrong, but that didn’t seem likely.  Francine had surely been taken by the Legion, there was no one else who’d mess with the Garrett twins like this and I had a bad feeling about Jack’s disappearance as well.  With Jack, I couldn’t be sure that it was the Legion, but I believed that it must be.  With how often he found himself in danger, I couldn’t shake the certainty that his absence _must_ be due to them as well.  Still, a small part of me reminded that I should leave a note, just in case.  I told him where I’d gone, and why, and mentioned the Garretts and how James had sought my help.  Besides, even if, somehow, I was wrong about this, and Jack was just taking a long walk, he was involved with the Legion, so sooner or later, I knew, he’d be enslaved, or kidnapped, or worse.  

It was after midnight when we reached the strip club.  I parked ten blocks away, just incase.  Garrett and I both had our guns out, but concealed and now that we were here, I realized how little I’d actually thought this through.  I had no idea where they would be kept.  Maybe I could have found satellite images or just talked to No Bark about the layout of the area, but I hadn’t.  We walked closer, keeping to the shadows and trying to be stealthy as possible.  

We were near the docks.  The Legion had a very military presence and a lot of men as well as ammunitions, the housing would probably be towards the outer edges of the Legion headquarters because there were many buildings and housing gang members was much less of a crime than keeping slaves or smuggling weapons.  Slaves would have to be kept somewhat apart from the weapons, so they couldn’t arm themselves, but they wouldn’t be too far for easy transport; the Legion probably used the same ships to smuggle both.  They’d keep slaves closer to the water than ammunition, maybe even on boats.  Water would make it more difficult for them to escape and it might ruin munitions.  

“We should check the docks first.  People they captured will probably be close to the boats they use to ship them.”

Garrett grimaced.  “You make it sound like they’re cattle.  Jeez.”

“I hate to say it, but that’s probably how the Legion sees them.”

We crept around the side of a filthy apartment building, probably for Legion soldiers, and saw the bay.  A series of old wooden docks extended from the built up shoreline, more than a dozen ships were moored there.  The docks weren’t exclusively Legion, or they didn’t seem to be, but only few boats looked like personal craft.  Aside from a tiny speedboat, a very old and small sailboat no more than twenty-five feet long, and a much cleaner sailing boat over fifty feet and probably closer to seventy, every ship seemed to belong to the Legion.  Most of them had burly men in black and red aboard their decks and a few had the Legion bull painted on their sides.  I felt concerned to notice a gigantic container ship among those crewed by the Legion, even if this one was docked farthest down the road, beside a few more container ships that looked more mundane.  A container yard bordered that side of the Legion base, or else the base encompassed it.  I didn’t like the idea of an international slaver organization controlling a shipping company, so I just hoped that the compound happened to border that and ended at the shipping yard’s chain-link fence.  

The men on the ships weren’t watching us.  Some just looked around like they were guarding something while others moved wooden crates to and from the vessels.  As we watched, a battered steel boat pulled away from the dock and set off across the bay.  Garrett and I exchanged a glance and the meaning was clear: let’s hope she wasn’t on that one.  Wooden crates, and debris littered this street and masked our approach, as did the shadow of the building in the light from streetlights one road inland.  The rain covered the sounds of our footsteps.  As long as nobody walked towards us, luck seemed to be on our side.  

We thought things were shaping up even better when a muffled yell drew our attention to a series of storage containers beyond the fence.  We watched from behind a stack of munitions crates while a Legion soldier stepped out of that crate to talk to another.  He shook one hand as if it had been cut and spoke angrily with a second soldier who’d been standing guard outside that container.  The second man nodded, his stance suggesting that he was dealing with a superior even if we couldn’t hear the words.  He drew a slender but brutal-looking whip and went inside.  We heard muffled screams for a few seconds before the second soldier came back out and the first went inside again, closing the container door behind him.  Neither of us failed to notice that the screams sounded female.  

What I’d seen and heard turned my stomach, but rushing in now would just get us killed.  I looked around and tried to formulate a plan.  The whipping suggested that that had been a slave, maybe even Francine, so we knew where they kept the people they captured, but we had a ten foot wall of chain link topped with barbed wire between us and them, and that didn’t even mention all the trained and armed soldiers.  

Garrett was glaring at me.  “What are you doing?” he mouthed,  “ _We need to help her!_ ”

“We need to get _in_ there without getting ourselves _killed_ ,” I hissed back, “And unless you have wire-cutters—”  

I’d been about to suggest that we find a different entrance, but before I could, another muffled scream erupted from inside the crate.  Every scream had been equal parts pain and rage, another reason to guess that it might be Francine screaming, and we didn’t have to wait long for our suspicions to be confirmed.  I’d been afraid from the start that Garrett might be a volatile companion for this and if I could, I would have stopped him from joining me, to protect both of us.  I would have made us investigate separately if I hadn’t felt like I needed to protect him, and I still don’t know what I really should have done that night.  

Somebody swore in Latin inside the container, loud enough that we could hear it, and a third scream was cut short by a sound I hadn’t heard before and didn’t want to identify.  The soldier in the crate opened the door again to shout at his subordinate.  Apparently, he was outraged by the behavior of the capture, or at least that was the gist I got from the Latin I could understand.  The soldier outside began to apologize.  I only heard the word Legate before the other man, apparently a Legate in the Legion’s corrupted Roman hierarchy, smacked him across the face with a severed head.  

The head bounced off the soldier’s spluttering face and rolled towards the fence, coming to a stop ten feet away from our hiding spot, staring sightlessly up at the rain.  The lights in the shipping yard, even as dim and poorly maintained as they were, still gave us enough light to recognize the face.  

Garrett resisted the urge to charge the fence, but not the need to assail both soldiers with the most vicious, if incoherent, insults he could conceive of at the time.  I’d never seen him this angry either.  Hearing his cursing, the blood-soaked soldier in the container stepped into view.  He was truly a towering man, standing over seven feet tall now that I had some form of size comparison.  In a fit of temporary insanity, Garrett fired three shots at the man who’d killed his sister, two of which ricocheted wildly.  The third was a miracle shot I couldn’t have made myself, although that was partly because my gun was much higher caliber.  Garrett didn’t aim for the Legate’s head, probably because he wore a thick metal mask which would have protected him, he shot low, towards the heart or else he just pulled the trigger as soon as he was aiming in roughly the right direction.  Garret had never actually shot before, as far as I knew, and I didn’t bother firing because of the fence, which made his first two shots ricochet.  His third bullet managed to pass through the fence and the Legate snarled and dropped the sword he’d been holding.  I glimpsed blood pouring from his side an instant before I noticed the footsteps rushing towards us from the docks.  

I yanked Garrett’s arm and he followed me.  The Legate and the soldier followed us but couldn’t keep sight of us through the crates, so the dockworkers were my main concern.  We had a head start, but they were faster, even if Garrett didn’t register that right now.  He ran out of instinct and I pulled him off his feet more than once scrambling around corners and over boxes in the hopes of losing our pursuers.  We had to be smart about this or we were doomed.  I didn’t think about trying to free anyone along the way, if we didn’t lose the Legion, they’d kill us and anyone with us.  I didn’t pay attention to where I was going, either, once we were safe we could find our way back there.  Dodging around the fifth or sixth dark alley, I noticed a black iron ladder just above my head and jerked Garrett towards it.  

We’d managed to gain some leeway in the dark and with all the crazy turns we’d taken, so he had the time to shake his head.  “Go.”  

“Garrett, we can both get out of here alive—”

“No we can’t,” he faced the entrance of the alley and crouched, holding his gun ready to fire in one hand.  “That was my sister back there.  We don’t know that they even saw you.  And we can’t outrun them.”

“Garrett…”  I sighed, one hand on the ladder now as I passed him my own gun.  “If you can take them all out, please do so.  And this…this has a lot of recoil.  Be careful.”  

He took it and gave me a grin, as if he was just tending bar and bantering.  “If you don’t get your ass up that fire escape, you’ll never be able to tell Jack your own crazy, dangerous story.”

I managed a half-hearted smile back and climbed as high as I could manage without making too much sound.  The Legion caught up with us before I reached the third floor.  

I had to hand it to him, he’d learned well.  I’d given Garret a few tips on shooting while we’d driven here, and he shot better than I’d expected.  Of the nine bullets he had, he fired them all, only missing once as the wall of two dozen soldiers flooded into the narrow entrance of the alleyway.  Only one of the low caliber shots from his gun hit anything vital; it nicked an artery.  All six shots of my pistol badly wounded Legion soldiers.  Four of the shots inflicted fatal wounds, two of them cut arteries, one punctured a lung, and the third was a point-blank shot to the temple.  Of the other two, one destroyed the knee of a legionary and would probably turn out to be fatal as well and the third was a shot to the gut which could kill by sepsis.  

It turned out to be quite an impressive last stand.  

Facing down twenty-four men with two pistols, the end result was inevitable.  Garrett was kicked back as he fired his last shot and one of the bigger soldiers planted a boot on his chest.  By this point, they knew he was out of bullets.  The man who had killed Francine arrived in the alley, stalking towards Garrett in a way that called to mind the tyrannosaur in Jurassic Park.  I liked to hope that he was no less stupid, it made me feel a bit better about my chances of stopping the Legion.  

The Legate must have known that Garrett was out of bullets, because he seemed absolutely calm, despite the blood still dripping down his arm.  The alley was dark, but from what I could see his forearms were also bloody, like he’d been bitten and I mentally congratulated Francine for that small victory.  If I’d still had my gun, I would have shot him now, this man was clearly high-ranking and from my vantage point I just might have been able to escape before they caught me now, or so I’d thought at the time.  

The Legate gave a quiet order that the other soldiers followed and I wished that I had heard.  One of them smacked Garrett in the head with the butt of his rifle and the rest hauled my friend away without a word.  The Legate paused, looking around the alley in enigmatic silence before following his men.  Either they hadn’t seen me earlier, or they thought I was long gone.  

I wanted to hope that Garrett would be able to escape, but that seemed quixotic so I just hoped that I’d be able to rescue him.  Assuming they hadn’t just taken him to an execution.  I shuddered, remembering the evidence that the Legion crucified people as punishment.  

Either way, I needed a new gun, if nothing else, and it might be best to see if there was any better way of doing this.  Maybe I could use a boat to get closer more easily.  Or a tank.  Both seemed equally likely.  

With the alley silent, I started back down the stairs only to feel something prod the small of my back.  I froze.  

“Why are you here?”  

The voice was unmistakably that of Vulpes Inculta, but the tone was more annoyance than hatred, which surprised me.  “Exactly how long have you been there?”  He let me turn around and face him, which must have been some kind of courtesy I hadn’t expected.  

“I was here before you arrived.”

“You have a habit of lurking on fire escapes in the rain?”

“I enjoy being outdoors.”

“In the city?” I gestured at the filthy buildings around us.

“Yes.”  Whatever patience he had was visibly depleting.  “I ask again, why are you here?”

Given the choice between getting crucified and getting shot, I chose the latter.  “Is this an existential quandary or a survey on the merits or late night fire escape tours?”

I heard him chamber a round.  

To my surprise he aimed the gun towards my feet.  “I do not wish to kill you, but I will cause you pain if you make this difficult.”

“Make what difficult?”  I wasn’t keen on pain, but from this guy, after the day I’d had, I felt like I’d chance it.  At the very least I might be able to cause him some in return.  “And weren’t you the one who said that if it weren’t for Jack, you’d quite happily put a bullet in my skull?”

He adjusted his grip on the gun tensely, but didn’t shoot.  “ _Why are you in Legion territory_?”

“Isn’t the whole city Legion territory?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t think I do—”

That gun was inches from my nose before I registered that he’d even moved.  “I _don’t_ want to kill you, at least not at the moment, although you are making it very difficult to restrain myself.  Do you _want_ to die?  You would very likely have been killed if you had been caught by anyone else, probably crucified.  Why risk that fate?”

I didn’t process that until he flipped the gun over in his hand and turned the safety on, holding it so he could readily pistol-whip me if the urge to shoot me became irresistible.  “Wait.  Why don’t you want to kill me?”

“Is your goal death?  Did you intend to annoy me into murdering you from the start?  I have more self control than that.”   He fell silent as if he wasn’t going to answer directly, but then thought better of it.  “Ideally, you would have already taken Jack and fled to Scotland, but now it is too late for that.”

“What do you mean?”

He answered my question with one of his own.  “Why are you here?”

I guess there was no point in continuing to hide it.  He probably knew anyway, or at least suspected.  “I came here with Garrett to rescue his sister.  I know Jack’s involved with the Legion, what do you have him doing—?”

A flashlight shone up at us and Vulpes had his gun pointed at me again before I even noticed the light.  A soldier called up from the ground, “Who goes there?”

I half expected Vulpes to shoot the man on the ground, idiot that I was.  All that talk of not wanting me dead had managed to fool me, so it almost came as a surprise when the cold-blooded bastard called back, “I have things under control, Decimus.  I have caught a skilled slave for Caesar.”


	43. While You See A Chance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack makes yet another rash decision, but this time, disaster is averted (albeit narrowly.)

Between my indecision and the nightmare I had yet to resolve happily, I’d gone for a longer walk than usual.  It wasn’t just that, and it bothered me that my love life bothered me more than the fact that I’d helped enslave someone.  Boone’s fate _didn’t_ bother me almost at all, but it shook me to realize just how amoral I could easily be.  If things had gone differently, I could have done very well as an officer of the Legion myself.  I wasn’t so bothered by my own lack of morals as by the way I knew my friends would have viewed that.  Mila already didn’t like my relationship status, she would have flipped out if she knew I’d been helping the Legion willingly.  I’m pretty sure Daisy, Gibson, Cass, and Vero wouldn’t approve either, and my mother would have flipped shit.  Arcade would certainly flip shit as well, but it hurt more to know that this would probably break his heart.  That and the image of blood on steel from my dream were the focus of my thoughts for much of the walk.  

When the storm broke and rain soaked my clothes, I’d stopped at a bar called the Prospector’s Saloon and drank some cola until it died down.  I’d dried off by the time I got home around four in the morning, but the rain started while I was climbing the stairs.  I bolted inside amid a torrential downpour and shut the door without looking back.  I kicked my boots into the closet and shed the rest of my clothes on the hooks by the door, trying to be quiet under the assumption that Arcade was already asleep.  

Turing rushed down the stairs to greet me and Rex made his way to the door a few minutes later.  He’d been in the kitchen, judging from the sound of his wheels on the floor, so I figured Arcade must have gotten home late and hadn’t finished dinner yet.  That didn’t make sense, it was too late for dinner.  Maybe he’d been reading at the table and fallen asleep instead.  Or maybe Rex had just been hungry.  The silence in the house suggested that Arcade must be asleep, so I didn’t call out to him.  Dogs in tow, I went to get myself a snack, not bothering to dress on the basis that I’d just go upstairs and shower.  The kitchen was empty.

I wolfed down a sandwich and concluded that Rex must have just been hungry.  I helped both dogs up the stairs and found the bed empty as well.  That was a bit strange.  Alarm bells hardly rang at this point, I felt slightly concerned, but with the way the hospital had been lately, I figured he’d gotten called in to work and I just hadn’t seen the note yet.  I wanted to shower before I looked around, it wasn’t like this was life or death.  The dogs settled into their beds in the bedroom and I went to shower.  

It didn’t strike me as odd that I found the tub wet or saw small puddles around the room.  It wasn’t the dogs, they were afraid of the bathroom, and Arcade usually showered before work.  With no rugs, neither of us were too careful about tracking water around and the towels were annoyingly distant from the tub.  It wasn’t like the water was anywhere else in the house.  

The shower was cold, which did surprise me, although I changed the temperature fast enough that I didn’t mind too much.  The thing was, the water usually came on pretty warm if someone had showered at all recently, and the bathroom hadn’t dried, so Arcade must have left no more than an hour ago.  Maybe he took a cold shower for some reason.  

I dried off after I was clean and searched the bedroom for a note while I threw on pajamas.  I was exhausted, especially after my walk, but with the dream I’d been having, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong.  

The bedroom tables, shelves, and dressers were all as I had left them.  Aside from books the lamp, notepad, and souvenirs on my desk were the only objects on our otherwise bare furniture.  My clutter was digital, aside from my paintings, and we were both relatively neat.  At least, mail was sorted as soon as it was received, trash was disposed of, and we didn’t leave papers lying around.  My studio was the exception, and sifting through those piles was not the sort of thing I wanted to do when I was this tired.  I went to check downstairs first.  

The kitchen held a single dirty plate on the counter and a second plate of uneaten dinner I hadn’t noticed waiting for me in the fridge.  That would be lunch tomorrow, I guess.  I put the dirty plate in the sink and found myself slightly disturbed that it hadn’t already been there.  He must have gotten called in while finishing dinner, or he would have cleaned it, he didn’t like leaving plates dirty.  Still no sign of a note.  

I searched the hallway, finding nothing on any table and even checking under the rugs in case the note had somehow fallen.  There was nothing in the living room either, not on or under either or our laptops, on any game system, or under the rugs in there.  I checked the outside of the front door, which remained dry despite the storm.  I guess the balcony did its job.  The porch, likewise, showed no sign that a note had been left there and I couldn’t imagine that Arcade would have hidden a note outside to begin with.  Both bathrooms remained clean, puddles aside, and I even checked the mirrors with steam.  Good to know the smiley face I’d drawn two weeks ago was still there.  

My studio was the only place left to check.  Noon had cleared away the fog and the storm was long gone by the time I’d absolutely convinced myself that my piles of sketches, paints, and memos held nothing written by Arcade.  

The closets also remained as I had left them.  

Left with few other possibilities, I eyed the dogs, who stared back.  I’d never known my pets to eat paper, but I had heard that some animals did.  Rex showed no inclination towards pica, he even turned his nose up at some dog treats, while I knew that Turing hadn’t eaten anything I didn’t give him since that incident where he’d scarfed down ten grams of gyokuro tea, a box of Belgian waffles, two bags of gummy bears, and a bar of baking chocolate.  At the time I’d been amazed that he’d even survived and he must have learned well because now he wouldn’t go near anything that smelled like tea or chocolate, and most of my note pads had had at least a little tea spilled on them.  The dogs wouldn’t have eaten it.  

I sighed at them.  “Neither of you know where Arcade went, do you?”

I didn’t expect an answer but both dogs barked happily.  I ate the food in the fridge and stood in the kitchen, unable to sit down.  

If Arcade was gone and hadn’t left a note…  I tried not to think that he’d been kidnapped, but it was hard not to go there.  The idea that Vulpes would have stolen the note seemed highly unlikely; for all his animosity towards Arcade, stealing a note like that seemed too petty for him.  I’d searched the whole house and I searched again while I ate, with no change in the result.  I checked my phone.  Nothing.  I called Arcade, just incase, and the phone went to voicemail.  I kept my phone on and with me anyway, hoping he’d call back.  It might have been possible for Arcade to have forgotten to leave a note, but he would have left me some form of message by phone, if that was the case.  It was as if he’d fallen off the face of the earth.  The more I thought of it, the more I felt that once again my nightmare was well on the way to becoming reality.  I was probably just being paranoid.  I hadn’t slept in over a day, and that would lead anyone’s mind to crazy delusions.  I went upstairs to sleep.  

~       ~       ~

I woke up in a house still empty, still feeling as if a storm was gathering above me.  Even disoriented by sleep, I had the presence of mind to check my phone.  No missed calls or texts.  I’d slept much longer than I’d expected and it was six in the morning the following day.  The dogs had slept as well, as dogs did, and they hadn’t left the room until they headed downstairs with me.  I fed them, let them out, and changed their water before going to get my own breakfast.  

I hadn’t fully realized what was happening until then.  Arcade always made breakfast.  Even if he got called in to work or if he hadn’t had time to sleep.  Even though I was usually still asleep when he cooked.  In the grand scheme of things, I guess it wasn’t a big deal that breakfast of some form wasn’t waiting for me in the fridge this morning, but it just happened to be that fact which made it sink in that Arcade was gone.  He’d left no note and he hadn’t been home in…over a day, now that I thought about it.  He’d been captured by the Legion, probably enslaved.  I knew what I saw every night and even given the haze of emotion in the dream, slavery made the most sense.  It didn’t dawn on me that he might already be dead.  

I needed to save him.  

I also needed to eat.  Whether or not I went through with my idea of simply charging into the Legion’s headquarters and doing whatever I had to to get him out, I couldn’t do it as hungry as I was right now.  I hadn’t eaten in two days.  

But I couldn’t summon the effort to cook.  

I got out two pieces of white bread and half-heartedly smeared slabs of butter on them.  I set the buttered-bread on a plate and took it to the table.  I sat down and stared mournfully at my pathetic excuse for a breakfast.  

In the silent house, seeing today’s bleak grey shrouding this city that I’d almost begun to consider my home, the bread was just the last reminder of all my worries and loss.  

Tasting it was even worse.  The bread had gone stale and the butter slid off when I picked it up, leaving nothing but a faint residue.  I ate it anyway because it wasn’t worth cooking anything better.  

I wasn’t going to drag my dogs into this.  If I never came back, at least they deserved to survive.  I left them at the door and figured that, if I didn’t return, Daisy would surely find them and get them to Gibson or someone else who’d take care of them.  

Even though I had only been there once, and even though that had been months ago, my feet still knew the way to the Gomorrah.  

I walked there like a man possessed.  I saw no one I knew and was too lost in my thoughts to acknowledge the few passersby who greeted me.  By now I’d memorized every detail I had dreamed of the Legion headquarters and all the buildings near it, but I had no way of knowing if this was the day I had dreamed.  I didn’t think that it was.  Arcade could not become as hopeless as he had appeared in my dreams in just one day.  At least, I didn’t want to believe there was any chance that he might be as fragile as I was.  He wasn’t.  He couldn’t be.  

I guess the Legion operated mostly at night, which made sense, because the area was almost deserted when I arrived a bit before eight in the morning.  The strip club was closed.  Somewhere closer to the bay industrial machinery whirred and screeched.  A container ship sounded its horn and pulled away from the dock.  I tried not to inhale, but the smell of brine almost masked an earthy putrescence that sent a shiver down my spine even if I didn’t truly recognize the latter scent.  

For years, but especially recently, I’d noticed that sea water had an interesting effect on me.  After the amount of times that I’d nearly died in seas and saltwater, it stirred my adrenaline.  I’d found a level of fear of the sea, but at the same time, I’d grown up sailing and staring out over the blue, and it had always inspired me.  

Right now, the murky green waters left me feeling determined.  It was terrifying, like the Legion, but I still loved to sail and I’d still risk the ocean to do so (if I’d still owned a boat.)  If I could face the sea itself, I could handle the Legion.  I didn’t really have much choice in either matter, not living on an island, and not with Arcade gone.  I could do this.  I _had_ to do this.  

Somehow, in all my adventures and all my years of desperately trying to fit in, I had gotten pretty good at blending in, when I wanted to.  It helped that today I had opted for a more boring outfit.  I wore looser jeans than usual and a nondescript black t-shirt with no leather jacket and gutties instead of my boots.  Hardly anyone around here wore suits and I wasn’t in a place where anything close to formal would look natural, I actually picked out some of my shabbiest clothes to blend in, although I still looked rather more clean than most of the very few people I saw around here.  

I passed three men, none of whom were Legion, and none of whom cast me a second glance.  I mirrored their body language, slouching a little, shuffling my feet, and moving erratically.  I kept my head slightly lowered.  Maybe if I looked like a stoned vagrant I’d be able to creep in here without getting stopped by the Legion.  Not that they let vagrants wander around willy-nilly, but they probably wouldn’t expect one to cause trouble as long as I stayed out of buildings and out of their way.  

The trouble was, the buildings all looked pretty similar and seeing a place in my dream, even clearly, didn’t mean I could remember enough to navigate it in real life.  In my dream, I’d seen the headquarters, the real headquarters, not the Gommorah, but some sort of…throne room, for lack of a better word.  But now, in daylight, unable to get my bearings, I couldn’t find it.  What I did find was a harbinger of what I had seen happen every night for over a month.  

At first, I thought it truly was the end result of the future I’d been fearing for over a month, a future which had come sooner than I’d expected either way.  

Rounding a corner as I had when I’d left the Gommorah on my first night in the States, I stepped into an alley not so different from that one and found a corpse.  Unlike the corpse I had seen then, this one was clearly deceased.  In the warm, damp air, decay had set in very quickly.  The body lay dumped between the buildings on a pile of burnt refuse inside a metal barrel.  Blackened hands had curled to claws in the pyre, but the body was cold.  I could tell that the man had been dead when he was burned.  Flies clustered over the charred face, dispersed, and resettled as a rat gnawed the man’s jaw.  I registered that this was a man, and an adult, but took stock of no further observations before bile and assumptions rose in my throat.  

I kicked the barrel, scattering the scavengers and jostling the body so one pierced palm shifted more clearly into view.  The man had been crucified.  

I blamed myself, drawing the irrational conclusion that this had to be Arcade.  I forgot the Legion had ever done this before.  I forgot the stories I’d read.  I forgot everything I knew Vulpes had done.  I forgot the crucified body in my basement.  There was only this corpse, this life that _had_ to be Arcade’s.  It was my fault he’d gotten involved in this.  It was my fault he even knew where to go to find the Legion.  

I didn’t feel my knees hit the pavement.  I didn’t notice the tears running down my face.  I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at the charred corpse.  I didn’t notice when it happened that I was no longer alone.  

I realized eventually that someone was standing beside me after I’d been staring for minutes which felt like days, but he remained silent and I had no room in my thoughts for him at the time.  

Maybe if things had gone differently, I theorized, maybe I should have come to find him yesterday.  Maybe I could have prevented this.  

Logic came, oddly enough, in a memory of my dream.  My dreams had never been wrong before.  This couldn’t be true.  My dream gave me time.  My dream gave me a chance.  In my dream, I could stop this.  This corpse couldn’t be Arcade.  

The idea that I’d been wrong was all I needed to reevaluate.  The rat and flies were eating again, but below the black cloud, the skull was shaped differently.  Even curled from the heat, this body was too short.  This couldn’t be him.  

It had been irrational to assume that it was him from the start.  

A hand on my arm hauled me to my feet and I didn’t even consider whether or not I should obey until I was standing.  Vulpes stood beside me.  I glimpsed him slipping a phone back into his pocket as he kept a cautious eye on the area around us.  “You need to leave.”  

He steered me towards the other end of the alley and I didn’t question him as he led me to a battered white Beetle with a handful of flower bumper-stickers still faintly visible through the new coat of paint.  It was Arcade’s car.  I wanted to ask, fearing confirmation of any of the fears harrying my mind, but I was silenced by his expression.  The man had always seemed like he could face a charging bear without flinching, and yet right now he looked almost…nervous.  

I hadn’t stopped and I kept moving as he led me towards the trunk.  I caught sight of Alerio waiting on the other side of the car, but couldn’t think of any reason he might be there.  He and Vulpes exchanged a glance and Alerio left, I later guessed that he’d gone to cover for his boss’s absence.  

Vulpes opened the trunk and looked over at me.  He spoke very deliberately.  “You cannot be seen here.”  

He was lucky that I’d come to my senses enough to realize his implication.  I got into the trunk as quickly as I could and pulled my legs against my chest, folding my arms around them to take up less space.  Vulpes made sure not to hurt me as he closed the lid.  “You will be able to breathe.”  He sounded as though he wished he had an alternative and I trusted that he didn’t.  

Sealed in the pitch black, I was terrified for a moment.  I was in a car, moving through streets I had no way of seeing.  At any moment, we could be struck by a bus or a truck.  At any moment, the breaks might give out on one of the steep and lethal hills.  At any moment, the trunk could spring open.  But this was Vulpes.  He would drive carefully.  And he wouldn’t have put me back here if this wasn’t the safest place.  I didn’t know for certain what would happen if I were discovered, but I guessed that I would end up like that body I’d found.  I almost believed that Arcade might end up the same way, in a few days, but the fate I’d seen for him was worse.  

He was the one in danger here; with Vulpes protecting me, I knew I was safe.

I felt the engine start and the Beetle rumbled slowly down the alley, traveling for only a few moments before it paused.  Even without sight, the slow and casual stop seemed too practiced and I shivered.  I hadn’t heard anything, but Vulpes spoke as if answering a question.  

“You find it so fascinating that I must dispose of this vehicle?”

Vulpes had an edge of well-concealed malice to his tone but the man who replied made no secret of his contempt.  “I find it interesting that you choose to dispose of it personally.”  The voice was powerful, a deep and threatening growl.  Locked in the trunk, I imagined a colossal dragon, looming from the smoke of a fire.  I had never seen the man in my dreams, but the voice seemed eerily familiar.  This man was dangerous, I knew it as I’d known Vulpes to be dangerous when I’d first seen him in this city.  

Vulpes responded coolly.  “The city is growing wise, Lanius.  Albeit slowly.  We must be more careful about where we dispose of such things.”  I got the sense that he might be referring to the corpse I’d found as well as the car we were in.  With the car, I could be absolutely certain that Arcade was here, though I hadn’t realized that until now.

Vulpes’ remark must have been a subtle dig, because Lanius sounded just a bit more hostile in his reply.  I hadn’t thought that would have been possible without them actively attacking each other.  “I choose to leave warnings.  If the fools do not heed them, they will face the consequences.  _I_ do not fraternize with the enemy.”

There was a pause and I fully expected Vulpes to kill him.  Something clicked near the driver’s side front window, not a gun, but a softer sound of objects bumping against one another.  It might have been someone gripping a weapon.  

“I assure you,” Vulpes warned, “our reflexes are evenly matched.”

Lanius seemed to release whatever he had been about to draw and the Beetle accelerated onto the road.  From the trunk I followed the turns until my thoughts and worries overwhelmed my sense of direction and I lost track of where we were.  

*       *       *

Lanius was growing bold.  He would not have openly threatened me unless he planned to have me killed very soon.  I had already stopped more than one attack, but with my current position in the Legion so precarious, he would begin to make more serious attempts.  And without the doctor to protect him, Jack would also be in danger.  I would risk my position in the Legion to watch him more carefully.  

I had already been using Jack’s basement as a second home; since the destruction of the newspaper tower, I’d kept many of my possessions hidden there.  It would be best to simply live there, both to better protect Jack and to avoid those in the Legion who might seek to kill me.  My Legion quarters were well-known, easy to find, and easy to access.  The door had only a simple lock and could not be barred while the fire escape made for easy access to the window.  Jack’s basement was defensible, and few of Lanius’ men knew its layout as it had been used primarily by frumentari.  As long as I returned to Caesar whenever possible, I should be able to avoid my Legion housing entirely.  However that also meant that I would be unable to protect the doctor as well.  

I had considered telling Jack that the body he had found was not his friend, his…lover.  I disliked admitting it, but it seemed clear that Jack would not willingly leave him to his fate.  If he hadn’t been so attached to me, perhaps he would already have left, which would have saved them both, but now that wasn’t possible.  I did not wish to leave the Legion; if Lanius could be dealt with or at least deterred, I would no longer have any reason to leave, and Jack would not leave the country without either myself or Arcade.  The doctor was a lost cause, unless Caesar chose to sell him, and I doubt he would survive that long.  As it was, I had barely gotten him to Caesar alive and he seemed determined to provoke anyone within earshot.  He’d only recently sunk into a sullen silence and that only lasted until Caesar spoke to him.  He was sure to get himself killed, sooner rather than later.  I could only hope that Jack would realize that, that was the main reason I had not told him that the corpse he’d found was not the doctor but the foolish bartender who had been with him.  I did wish I could have told Jack that I regretted transporting him in the trunk. 


	44. The Last Resort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack makes his choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from either the song by the Eagles or the other one (I forget the artist.) They have somewhat different connotations.   
> Also, I apologize for the past participle. I didn't want that bit to get thrown in a few chapters back, but I wanted to make it clear that those events happened before Vulpes rescued Jack. A few bits are a different tense because those are either things which are still true by the end of this chapter or those are theories Vulpes has about various events.   
> Also, I did not translate the Latin. It's pretty much all swearing, I thought it was better left as is.

We pause somewhere on the way to wherever he’s driving, but he doesn’t get out and I’m too distracted to wonder why.  Arcade is alive.  Trapped.  Enslaved.  I can’t stop thinking about him.  I need to get him out of there, I need to save him, but I _can’t_ , I’m just one guy.  

Dragging my friends into this seems wrong.  Against the Legion, I don’t have anyone who could stand a chance.  Except maybe Vulpes.  

Vulpes didn’t drive very far.  I guess he felt bad keeping me in the trunk and got to his destination as quickly as possible.  The car stopped permanently in a noisier area than I’d expected.  I heard Vulpes get out and close the door.  Amid the sound of traffic and some kind of machinery, I heard him set the keys on the lid of the trunk and expected him to let me out but he didn’t.  The noise outside continued with no change and no sign of Vulpes and I remained curled up in the trunk.  

My legs had started to cramp, but it was no worse than flying coach.  I hadn’t fallen out of here, so I doubted that I’d be able to break out.  The air was fresh, suggesting that Vulpes had cut a hole somewhere for ventilation, but I couldn’t see it, and in December, on a cloudy day, the trunk was cool.  In the dark, with no real alternative, I contemplated my options.  

I suppose that having no imminent danger to myself and being unable to do anything but think, whatever anxiety I might have had abated.  

I had nearly fallen asleep when someone picked up the keys.  

*       *       *

The garage had been busy today.  We had three cars inside and another five parked out front, waiting for service.  The drivers were gone, of course, so it isn’t like anyone was waiting, but it was still frustrating.  We were all a bit on edge today anyway.  Garret’s BMW had been here for days with no sign of him.  We couldn’t leave that nice of a car outside the garage so it added to our space problems, but it wasn’t like him to abandon it.  Nobody had seen him in days either.  

Cass had been low on booze anyway, so she’d gone to check the Wrangler and hadn’t come back yet.  I liked to hope she’d just found their stash of good whiskey, but the whole thing just tingled my spine.  Something was wrong here.  This city had been crawling with the Legion lately, things were looking so bad that my family had retreated into their bunker and shut it more tightly than a virgin’s butt.  I wasn’t a pessimist, but this was really beginning to worry me.  If somebody didn’t do something soon…

Raul got out from under the Chevy he’d been working on to get a drink, but he paused once he stood up.  “Hey, boss?”  Gibson looked up from taking inventory as he continued, “Does anyone else think that Beetle looks familiar?”  I couldn’t see what he was staring at, so I stepped around the hood of the Honda in front of me to look outside the garage.  

It _was_ Arcade’s car.  Somebody had white-washed it, but if anyone took more than a passing glance, the flower stickers were still visible.  Somebody had left the keys on the back, holding down a very small note that fluttered in the wind.  Gibson’s dogs seemed very interested in that trunk.  

“Did anyone notice when that got here?”  Nobody answered me, but we all put down what we’d been doing and walked over.  I don’t think anybody wanted to voice what we were thinking.  This was Arcade’s car.  We hadn’t seen him in a while either, come to think of it.  

I picked up the note.  “Check the trunk.”  Well, that was simple.  

We all expected a corpse and were all surprised.  

*       *       *

The trunk swung open.  

“Jack?!”  Veronica and Gibson both exclaimed at the same time.  I took it as a rhetorical question and sat up in silence.  Gibson, the only one of them with decently clean hands, ran her fingers over my forehead.  I think she was checking for a fever or any sign of injury, but I wasn’t sure.  “Are you okay?  What happened?!”

“I’m fine.”  I stretched.  I still wasn’t sure what to do.  I had to save Arcade, but that was impossible.  I felt trapped.  Maybe discouraged.  Maybe this was despair, but it wasn’t the kind I’d used to feel.  I’d lost too many people.  Why was this happening _again_?  I couldn’t let this happen again.  

Gibson, Raul, and Veronica talked frantically around me.  

“How did this car get here?  Who painted it?”

“They did a really crappy job.”

“We have security cameras, right—?”

“Yes, but there’s a blind spot in this corner of the parking lot.  We wouldn’t see anything.”

“Sounds to me like whoever did this knew where to park so we wouldn’t see them.  That’s bad news, boss.”

I started to walk home, more exhausted than anything else.  I hadn’t been awake too long, or at least I don’t think that I had, but today had been too much of an emotional hurricane.  Despair was less a feeling than an absence of feeling, like dark was the absence of light.  I’d felt too much today and just couldn’t feel any more right now.  

Veronica grabbed my shoulders to stop me.  “Jack,” she stared up at me, nearly eye-level because of how much I was slouching, “What happened?  Where is Arcade?”  

I shook my head.  “He’s gone.”

That nearly constant smile sank to a shocked frown.  “What?”

I shook my head again and shook her off, resuming my walk until she caught up again.  

“How?  What happened?  Who took you here?”  I didn’t answer and she added angrily, “Jack, is the person who took you here the one who k—”

“No.”  I didn’t even know what she was asking, though I could guess.  “He’s a friend.”

Raul, who had started following me as well, interjected, “Oh, another `friend,’ boss.  I didn’t peg you for the `hostage fetish’ type.”

That actually got me to smile, albeit very briefly.  Veronica stopped to give Raul a dubious frown.  “Jack, what happened?”

I didn’t answer Veronica, but as it happened, our parade up the street had not gone unnoticed.  A somewhat shrill and very familiar voice drowned out Veronica with a yell, “ _Jack Lachlan MacLean!!_ ”

“The fifth!”  I corrected Daisy automatically.  

The old woman stormed down the sidewalk to meet us, and smacked the side of my face.  I’m sure she could have left me reeling if she’d wanted to, so she’d gone easy on me to leave only a bad bruise.  

“Where _is_ Arcade?!  Where have _you_ been?!  I haven’t heard anything from either of you in days!”

For a moment, I just stared.  This was Daisy, I almost wanted to believe that, with Johnson, and Moreno, and Krieger, and maybe Doc Henry, they could rescue Arcade if I told them where he was.  Then I looked at things rationally.  They were old, and the Legion was an army.  Even at the top of their game, they didn’t have the resources to take them down on their own.  The cops had to know and they hadn’t or couldn’t stop the Legion, so five old-timers with stolen military equipment wouldn’t have any more luck.  They’d only get themselves killed if I told them.  

But Daisy was smart.  If I made it sound like there was any chance that Arcade was alive, I had no doubt that she’d try to rescue him.  I couldn’t let that happen.  At least I already looked shaken enough that she’d hopefully believe me.  She hadn’t noticed my appearance from a distance, but up close, her face softened and she apologized.  “Something happened.  Sorry.  Where’s Arcade?”  

I’d heard the tone she used a thousand times before, it was that military/survival situation voice.  I wasn’t dying, I wasn’t injured, therefore I was fine.  My emotions didn’t matter at the moment.  Arcade wasn’t here, he might be injured, time might be critical to keeping him alive.  Daisy wanted a direct answer very quickly.  

“He’s………. gone.”  I’d planned to say dead.  I’d expected to say dead.  But I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t voice my worst fear.  

Daisy’s serious demeanor slowly faded away.  There was no immediate threat anymore.  Soldier Daisy took a backseat to Daisy the mother.  She wasn’t really his mother, but she might as well be, and I couldn’t imagine her looking more in-shock had he really been her son.  Raul and Vero hovered around me, not sure quite who to comfort first or what to do amid this haze of tragedy.  I couldn’t handle any of it right now.  I was going to sleep.  And when I woke up in maybe a day, or six, I’d eat any ice cream I had left in the freezer.  And paint myself into a stupor.  

I sidestepped Daisy and kept walking.  

That broke her daze.  

“Wait!”  I couldn’t tell if she meant that as an order or if she was begging me.  “How?  What happened?”

I caught sight of the Wrangler when I paused.  Both doors were open and Cass jogged down the street towards us.  

“Vero!  Some prick broke into the Wrangler, the lock’s all fucked up and they smashed all the booze!  The twins are both gone and there’s blood behind the bar, it looks like somebody shot one of them bad.”

Disjointed from all the emotion, my mind still put two and two together.  Arcade had driven to the Legion headquarters.  Something had prompted him to do so.  The Legion seemed to avoid alcohol and drugs, they wouldn’t take kindly to a bar in their territory (aside from the Gommorah) from what I could tell and the Garrets could easily have made enemies of them for a lot of reasons.  If James had been enslaved or had gone to Arcade for help when his sister was killed or captured, Arcade would have helped him.  And the corpse I’d found had been about the right height to be James Garrett.  The skull even resembled the shape of his face.  

Daisy caught up to me while I came to that realization.  

She clamped both hands on my shoulders, turned me to face her and asked insistently, “Jack, what happened?”

I didn’t know what to say.  If I didn’t tell her, she’d figure it out or assume the Legion had killed him and go in there guns blazing.  But I couldn’t tell her the whole truth.  I pieced together what I could say.  “He tried to rescue James Garrett.”

Vero tilted her head, “Garret?  Do you know who took him?”

I shook my head and shrugged.  “Looked like some gang, but I don’t think they were Legion.”  And image popped into my head and I went with it, “They might have been bikers.”

Cass groaned.  “Sounds like the Scorpions to me.  Those assholes just kill for sport.”

Daisy frowned at me, but I guess my story made enough sense that nobody questioned it.  

I didn’t know quite what to say anymore and I really just wanted to rest.  Maybe after a good long sleep I’d have a better idea of what the hell I was going to do.  

I started back towards my house and nobody stopped me.  Vero began to follow me and then stopped.  “Stay safe, Jack.  Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

I almost raised an eyebrow and made some quip about one of the many ways we were vastly different in our actions, but today I couldn’t summon the good humor to make such a joke.  I nodded and walked on.  

My house remained as I had left it, both dogs greeted me at the door and then followed me to the bedroom, lying down on their respective beds while I went to sleep.  With everything I’d been through so far, I guess it should be surprising that it took this long to really overwhelm me.  Even in my darkest moments, I’d always had some plan of action.  Kicked out and having fled across an ocean and a continent, I’d still had more of a plan than I did now.  All I could think was to simply charge in, knowing how that would end.  

Before I’d always been focused, either on emotion or on action, but right now I felt numb, and action seemed futile.  As a result, my mind was almost blank.  I guess that was the reason that, for the first time in a very long while, I had almost no dreams.  

I did have one dream, although I couldn’t remember the details.  Most of the time my dreams were relatively clear, like real life after a strong dose of morphine, but the dream I had that night was more like a mad lib.  

I had the vague sense that I was back in the Highlands, except the clouds were rabbits and I was trying to find something that might have been a fork.  As dreams went, the insanity of this for some reason didn’t snap me out of the immersion and make me lucid dream.  What did happen was that, at some point, the peaceful, sunshine-and-rainbows atmosphere broke and the fields cracked open with a much quieter sound than I would have expected.  Falling into the chasm that had opened up beneath me in the dream, I jolted awake.  

It was dark; through the heavy curtains, only the faintest trace of moonlight entered the room.  I could make out the canopy of the bed, the closed curtain of my studio, and most of the other furniture only because I knew roughly what the room normally looked like.  I saw Rex watching me in the dark, the moonlight a barely visible gleam in his eyes.  Turing was also awake, head up, ears pointed towards the bathroom.  Neither dog had gotten up.  

I still felt like sleeping, but something felt wrong.  I had dismissed my dream as nothing but a nightmare, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the dogs and I weren’t alone right now.  

I sat perfectly still, straining my ears for any sound and hearing nothing.  The bathroom door stood open, but the door to the stairs had been closed.  I liked to keep it open in case the dogs needed to go out or drink while I was asleep.  Someone had closed it.  Probing the darkness of the bathroom, I saw nothing.  The room’s only small window remained in shadow during the night and the closed curtain blocked what little light could have reached it.  The opened door to a room I couldn’t see inside unnerved me, but I felt eyes on the back of my head while I stared into the bathroom.  

If it weren’t for the door to the stairs, I would have just assumed I was being paranoid and gone back to sleep.  The idea that more than one person might have broken in seemed completely ridiculous.  

I looked behind me, scanning the shadows by the bookshelves, dresser, and desk.  My chair had turned around.  I always pushed it into the desk to be out of the way when I wasn’t using it, but now the high-backed leather desk chair sat facing me, the largest window in the room directly behind it.  I willed my eyes to detect some trace of movement, or form, or _any_ sign that someone was there.  I had very good vision, slightly better than 20/20, last time I’d had my eyes checked, but I couldn’t pick anything out from the blackness of the chair.  

The next few seconds, things happened more quickly than I could recognize them at the time.  

The floor creaked behind me as a man lunged forwards from the bathroom, machete in hand.  Rex barked and leapt at the attacker, followed quickly by Turing who only mimicked the larger dog’s hostility.  A figure stood from the chair, gun in hand, the largest silencer I’d ever seen on the end of the barrel.  The man behind me swung a machete at Rex but missed as he noticed and turned toward the other man.  In horror and surprise, he yelped, “Vulp—!”  

Vulpes shot him.  The report echoed more loudly than I’d expected, given the silencer.  I hadn’t had time to react before the intruder fell dead onto the rug, missing most of his skull.  Vulpes did something to his pistol, turning the safety on, I guessed.  “Apologies for the mess.”

I turned on the light to see Rex and Turing sniffing the corpse, a man in a clearly Legion mix of red and black.  “Who was that?”

Vulpes stalked over towards the body, “A colleague of mine, it would seem.  I would suspect that he works for a… a rival.”  

I decided to hazard a guess, “Lanius?”

Vulpes seemed surprised that I knew the name.  He nodded.  “Lanius disapproves of… well, of many things about me.”  

“Who is he?  Why is he sending people here?  To kill me, I figure, but why?  Why am I that important?”  

As usual, he hesitated.  After a long moment, he seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth hiding from me any more.  “Lanius and I are two of the most high-ranking officers of the Legion, we command Caesar’s armies and spies, respectively.  Putting aside more personal disputes, he prefers a direct approach but trusts Caesar’s judgement.  Many among the Legion, Lanius in particular, …disapprove of my relationship to you.  It is not common knowledge, however Lanius has substantial resources.  He does not need allies to pose a threat.”  He paused and then answered my later questions.  “I am not certain if Lanius wishes to kill you to eliminate our relationship and thus destroy something he sees as an insult to the Legion, or if attacking you is simply an attempt to provoke or harm me.  I suspect the former.”

I nearly asked him straight out why he didn’t just kill Lanius.  Vulpes being Vulpes, I had no doubt that he could work around any security Lanius might have, but thinking about it, the fact that he hadn’t just killed him made me think that Vulpes tolerated Lanius out of loyalty to the Legion.  I would have liked his help.  I’d probably have to ask and I was considering it, but I really didn’t want to force Vulpes to turn against the Legion directly.  It sounded like he thought of them as a family, and from personal experience, I didn’t want to force the guy to choose between his family and me.  Not if I could avoid it, anyway.  

“Why are you here tonight?”

He grinned slightly.  “No mention of yesterday?”

I faltered.  I’d actually forgotten to mention that.  “Thanks.  I figure you saved my life there.”  I wanted to ask him something, but my voice died in my throat and it took me a few tries to be able to speak again.  

He answered, either not noticing or not acknowledging my emotion.  “It was incredibly foolish of you to come there.  Truthfully, I am amazed that I got you out at all.”

He stooped to roll the corpse into the rug and I managed to voice my question as he did so.  “Do you know if Arcade is…alive?”

I couldn’t see his face while he wrapped the body, but he did pause.  “He is alive.  Last I saw, he was.”  

“But he’s in danger?”  I got up to assist, tucking the tasseled edges of the rug more tightly together.  “You’re very efficient at cleaning up a murder.”  

Vulpes gave me a strange look and hauled the corpse-rug, with my help, through the open painting and down to the salt where the other corpse was already desiccated.  He took a while to answer.  “Arcade is a slave.  I trust that you know him well enough that you would not expect him to be obedient.”  

Well, I wasn’t surprised.  Arcade had sass, I guess it was a good sign that his spirit hadn’t been broken yet.  “I presume there isn’t any way you can get him out of there.  You can’t buy him or anything, I’m guessing?”  

“I cannot.  You should know that he is not for sale, should you have any ideas about buying him yourself, though I am certain that you could make a very persuasive offer.  His current owner needs a medical professional more than money.”  Vulpes covered the new corpse in salt and draped the bloody rug over the mess.  “It would be very wise to consider the doctor a lost cause.”

Vulpes gave me a pointed stare and I met his gaze.  “I can’t do that.”

I think he knew what that really meant even if I hadn’t realized at the time.  His expression softened.  “What are you going to do?”

I sighed.  For a moment I thought, but came up with nothing more than I had yesterday.  “I don’t know.”

“Then for all intents and purposes, he is already dead.”  

I think Vulpes said that to protect me.  He may well have hoped that, with Arcade as good as dead, I would return to Scotland and Vulpes could join me whenever his work for the Legion brought him out there.  That would probably be the best-case-scenario for him, at this point, the Legion would not accept me as one of them, probably due to my business, or maybe just because of Lanius.  We could still be together as long as they could not reach us.  

Whether he wanted me for himself or just wished to protect me, that statement had the opposite effect.  “Then I need to figure out a way to save him.  Soon.”  

He narrowed his eyes just a bit.  This was one of the few times I recognized exactly what he was feeling.  Vulpes was incredibly frustrated with me.  

He didn’t try to stop me or make any other comment about my decision, instead he pulled out a gun very similar to the one he’d shot a few minutes ago.  “This was Arcade’s.  If you want it, it is yours, just don’t get yourself killed with it.”

I took the Deagle, turning it over in my hands a bit absently.  “Is it loaded?”

“Why do you wish to know?”

I shrugged, though I could guess why he was asking.  “Just curious.  It seems good to know.”

“It is not loaded.”

I nodded.  I’d never really looked at Arcade’s gun, aside from a passing glance.  It was old.  I didn’t know much about guns, but I thought I remembered that all of them had serial numbers on the side, but this one didn’t.  Either it never had one, or the number had been filed off; the gun’s surface was too worn and scratched to tell.  I had no idea if it was in disrepair or just old, so I asked.  

“It is extremely well-maintained.  I would suspect that he tended to it daily.”  

“ _Daily_ …”  Arcade was admittedly a bit fastidious, but taking care of it that often sounded like he was paranoid or like the gun had sentimental value.  He’d mentioned that his parents had been in the C.I.A.  I wondered if this was his father’s gun.  It probably was.  It felt oddly like a part of him.  

Vulpes checked his watch.  “Tell me if you do decide to….tempt fate.”

“Are you offering to help me?”

He’d started towards the stairs, but he paused to reply.  “No.  I…I would rather not be put in a position where I may have to kill you.”  

I stared and he gave me another mildly frustrated stare before his expression became something bordering on worry.  He turned and left without another word.  I’d only recently come to trust him so completely, and I still wasn’t sure if, should they force his hand, he would choose me over the Legion.  I wasn’t willing to bet that he’d betray them for me, as much as I trusted him.  

*      *      *

Over the next two weeks, Legion work consumed most of my time.  Caesar had been incapacitated for several days, the first of which had been the day I rescued Jack.  Arcade had, it seemed, been captured at the perfect time.  Shortly after the doctor had arrived, Caesar had explained his symptoms and amid protests about his predicament, Arcade had admitted the likely diagnosis.  I knew virtually nothing about medicine, aside from simple first aid, but I had suspected a brain tumor and been proved correct, assuming Arcade hadn’t been somehow mistaken.  The doctor had inevitably berated Caesar’s philosophy for the Legion, provoking an intense debate that had lasted several hours before one of Caesar’s headaches had driven him to end it.  

As uncooperative as he was, Arcade apparently couldn’t resist debating philosophy when Caesar brought it up.  The man could be incredibly stubborn when he chose to, and that trait had been about to cause more serious problems.  Lucius had been assigned to ask the doctor what he would need for the surgery while Caesar had rested.  Arcade had admitted that he needed a medical scanning device, ideally an MRI, and then insisted that Caesar would have been much better off holding a hospital hostage.  Of course, he’d berated himself for “giving us ideas” and when Lucius had ordered him to tell him what else would be required and then to operate, Arcade had flatly refused.  

I have no idea what means Lucius had used to attempt to persuade him, but after twelve hours, Caesar could not be awakened and I’d been asked to assist in “convincing” the doctor.  

I had found Arcade in a guarded chamber beside Caesar’s quarters.  He wasn’t restrained or bound, there was no need; unarmed and untrained in hand-to-hand combat, he had stood no chance against his only visitors, the praetorian guard and myself.  By the time I entered, he’d posed even less threat than usual.  I strongly suspected that he hadn’t been given food or drink for the past half a day and unless he’d been beaten unconscious, he had not slept in over a full day.  He had remained more coherent and dignified than I would have expected from that, especially considering that he’d also been also badly bruised and covered in blood.  He’d been stripped, probably to expose his back because he’d clearly been whipped, but there may have been other reasons.  Most slaves were kept nude as it made them less able to escape and seek help, though it was not outside the realm of possibility that he may have been raped.  With no furniture in the room, Arcade had sat on the cement floor, leaning forward slightly and holding his knees.  It had not been not a posture of defeat; he had kept his back straight and met my gaze when I entered.  He probably had lacked the strength to stand and I suspected that he had held his knees so he would not risk falling onto his shredded back if his remaining strength had given out.  He had still worn his glasses, though I had no idea if he had been given them intentionally so he could recognize me or had simply retrieved them after being beaten.  If the former had been the case, he would surely have recognized my voice.  

“Perite.”  

He had clearly recognized me.  Even spoken quietly, the venom in his voice would have made the meaning evident, even if I hadn’t understood the curse.  He must have been in a great deal of pain, or else he would have come up with a more elaborate way to express that sentiment.  I hadn’t been able to treat him civilly while other members of the Legion had remained within earshot outside the door, but unless he had spoken more loudly, they would not have heard any insults he might have uttered.  If they had heard him speak as he just had and I had not retaliated harshly, doubts of my loyalty would have only increased.  

“You will operate on Caesar.  And if he does not live, neither will you.”

I hadn’t really expected the threat of death to sway him and it had not.  I had thought he might try to spit at me, but he’d seemed to reconsider based on how dehydrated he probably was.  Instead, he had snarled, “Flocci non faccio.  Irrumator.”  

He hadn’t cared what we would do to him.  And he’d chosen a different word to insult me.  The man had quite an impressive vocabulary of Latin profanity.  

“The more you answer me in Latin, the more you seem to accept the Legion’s culture.”

“It’s ancient Roman culture!” he’d snapped, raising his voice enough that the guards had probably heard that.  “You’re only mimicking them!”  He’d seemed like he’d planned to rant about that, but had fallen silent suddenly.  He’d nearly fallen over and braced himself with one arm against the wall.  The wounds on his back had mostly scabbed over, but they’d cracked open when that happened and I noted that I didn’t see fresh blood.  He had probably been very dehydrated, I’d realized that he would need water and some medical attention or he wouldn’t be any use to anyone.  Lucius had been cutting it very close, if he had known this.  The sooner I convinced Arcade to help, the sooner he would get medical attention.  Well, relative medical attention.  

I had had a method to persuade him quickly, though I had planned to avoid it.  If he could be rendered compliant, he probably wouldn’t be subjected to more torture, which would have greatly increased his life expectancy here, by my reasoning.  Although, if he died, I might be able to persuade Jack to return to Scotland, beyond the Legion’s reach.  The trouble was that I feared what Jack might do if Arcade did die.  The man hadn’t been all that stable lately.  

Placating the doctor would be more helpful than trying not to break his spirit.  

I had crouched beside him and pulled out the key to Jack’s apartment, holding it tightly on the off-chance that he tried to take it for some reason.  I had known immediately that he recognized it.  There had been the possibility that I could have claimed that Jack had asked me to move in, but I would have probably been heard by the guards, and I couldn’t have been certain that such a claim would bother Arcade as deeply as what I had planned to say, so I had instead admitted, “This was not given consensually.”  

The horror had faded from his eyes, replaced by hate.  Arcade had glared at me and started to say something, but I’d cut him off.  “If you do not comply and perform the operation, keeping Caesar alive, it is not you who will suffer the consequences.”

Another flash of horror, despite his attempt to hide it.  He had started to speak, paused, and asked a different question.  “Is he working with you willingly?  Does he _want_ to help the Legion, or are you forcing him?”  

I’d frowned slightly.  Did he really trust my response?  I doubted it.  But the very fact that he had asked had suggested that he was desperate, and if Jack would not tell him he certainly had not had many sources of such information.  I had seen a level of pleading in his expression however much he’d tried to display only hate and frustration.  I just hadn’t been able to guarantee that his worry centered on Jack’s loyalties and not on his well-being.  I’d wanted to say that Jack was an ally of the Legion, perhaps that he always had been.  I could have gone so far as to claim that he’d only used the doctor in an attempt to lure him here, and we had resorted to using the Garretts when he’d failed.  I could have even suggested that Jack had gotten close to him to learn the truth about his elderly friends.  Such claims would have broken Arcade, preserving his life but not his spirit.  It would also almost certainly have prevented him and Jack from ever reuniting on amicable terms, although the chances of that had already become virtually nonexistent.  

But it would make my threats more convincing to say otherwise.  Besides, Jack had clearly made his choice already, even if he hadn’t realized it, and I had not expected that I could change his mind.  “No.  He has never helped us willingly.”  

I’d stood and put the key back in my pocket.  “Are you willing to cooperate, or will I be traveling back to the stairs?”

Arcade had scowled and sighed.  “Fine.”  He’d tried to stand, leaning on the wall, and nearly fallen over.  He had stumbled and collapsed against the wall as his knees refused to hold him, smacking his back against the plaster wall and sliding down it.  I’d fully expected him to pass out and he had certainly been in a great deal of agony, but he’d remained conscious.  “You know, I think I might need medical attention before I can operate.  Or are you going to hold me responsible if I drop dead?”  

I’d gestured for the guards to tend to him.  

The operation had been delayed a few more hours, but it ended up a success.  Arcade had remained the pet of the recovering Caesar as the Legion moved to take the city.  With our resources and careful tactics, it was not an impossibility, and Caesar planned to do so before the new year.  I operated more primarily before the main conflict.  For the weeks of Arcade’s captivity, after Caesar had recovered, I had little work aside from corresponding with a handful of very critical operatives.  Picus continued to ensure that the police of the city either did not know of us or did not stop us.  He had such seniority that, although I still contacted him regularly, I trusted that he knew what he was doing most of the time.  I hardly had the time to micromanage him anyway.  Almost all of my spare time was spent keeping an eye on Jack.  Lanius continued to send men after him, although many were quickly dispatched and all had been unprepared for my presence.  He had stopped sending them after a week, presumably because none had returned, but that only meant that he would change his tactics and I couldn’t be sure what to expect.  I had to prepare for anything.  

I spoke to Jack several times while I was guarding him, though he never seemed to realize that I was practically living in his basement.  I wanted to keep an eye on him, both to fend off Lanius’ men and to ensure that he didn’t do anything rash.  For several days, he wouldn’t sleep until he collapsed from exhaustion, likewise he ate and drank much less than he should have for the first week.  He painted almost constantly and every piece reflected what I already knew he was feeling.  He depicted traps, cages, and snares, usually with some animal inside of them.  The first few were dark works, all jagged blocks of color and sharp lines, the animals rendered as stylized monsters.  From there, despair and frustration became something I hesitated to call hope.  I didn’t ask him about it, only ensured that he was not planning an imminent assault and reminded him to eat, drink, and sleep.  He only went to buy groceries after I insisted that he do so, and it still took him half a day to get around to that.  

*      *      *

I couldn’t believe that Vulpes, of all people had talked me into taking better care of myself.  Still, I hadn’t left my house in almost two weeks, I did need food, and walking for groceries might help my temporarily sedentary lifestyle.  Although, I hadn’t really been eating, so I guess I wasn’t likely to gain much weight.  

Having basically spent the past weeks temporarily dead, I hadn’t bothered to open my laptop, check the internet, or turn on the TV.  For that matter, I hadn’t gotten the mail or opened the front door and I’d let my phone run out of battery.  I did turn the lights on at night, so I guess that was the only reason I hadn’t had cops showing up to look for my corpse, but I’d probably worried everyone local who knew me, more-so because word must have spread of Arcade’s demise.  

I hadn’t expected to hear the news that I did while I was out.  

Getting groceries went quickly, I’d always been a very efficient shopper and it didn’t take me long to grab the basic foods I could live off of without bothering to cook.  Cliff and Vero stood a few people ahead of me in the checkout line, behind the in-uniform cop whose bag of pomegranates refused to scan.  The cashier was waiting for his manager while Vero and Cliff chatted.  

“I know,” Cliff empathized, sounding so calm that I thought they might be complaining about gas prices or Jehovah’s Witnesses.  “First I have to close the store, then the Wrangler gets shut down, and now _this_.”

Vero frowned.  “Isn’t this a little bit bigger than the Wrangler shutting down?  I mean, he was the governor.”

The cop turned around while the cashier explained the problem to his manager, who’d finally arrived.  “Are you talking about what happened to Governor Kimball?”  

Vero hesitated and Cliff nodded.  “Yeah.  Do you know anything about it?  Nobody seems to know exactly who did it.”

Vero frowned, “Cliff, last I heard, they _don’t_ know.  Somebody blew up his helicopter, but they haven’t been able to figure out who planted the bomb.  The Legion claimed responsibility, so people are saying it’s another of their schemes.”

The officer scoffed.  “The Legion?  Please.  Those are just petty thugs.  They just like to say they’re responsible for everything.  I bet they’d say they did it if the President got killed too.”

She paid for and took her bag of fruit, grinning confidently all the while.  No wonder the Legion had no trouble from the police.  

Veronica waited until she was gone to remark, “If all the cops have that perspective, it’s no wonder gangs run rough-shod all over this city.”  

Cliff sighed a bit sadly.  

If the Legion had killed the governor, ….well, that wasn’t good.  I couldn’t care less about the state of the government, but if Arcade heard about that, it would suggest that the Legion had grown more powerful and he wouldn’t like that.  I didn’t expect the Legion to kill him directly; I trusted my dream to be accurate.  I wasn’t afraid that he’d be killed for disobedience or die from whatever they might do to him, I was more concerned with his state of mind.  As long as he was fighting, I trusted that he’d survive, but with this successful assassination, the Legion might seem too strong, and if he ever felt like nothing could stop it… I couldn’t let that happen.  

I made my choice.  

I knew it would be easier to help the Legion.  With the Legion, I would have allies, and with Vulpes at my side, nothing could stop us.  I didn’t know if that was evil, per-say, for where exactly did the truth of morality lie?  But I knew it wasn’t good.  I’d never been a very moral person to begin with, and I’d met countless people who felt that everything I did was immoral or disturbed, so I found that I cared about my own morality much less than most.  I’d learned to ignore that aspect of life a long time ago.  But I knew that the things which others called immoral were easy, and the actions so often called good tended to be difficult or even agonizing.  Perhaps that knowledge drove me to make the choice that I did.  

I had many questions about who I was, especially now that circumstance forced me to question my lack of morals, but after what Vulpes had said the day he’d first broken into my house, I had struggled to determine whether or not I was, or wanted to be, a loyal man.  After the life I had lived so far, I found that I would never trust an organization.  I could never be loyal to a group, only to individuals, and after cutting it down to the wire, I’d finally decided with whom my loyalty lay.  

Now I just had to decide what to do about it.  

I didn’t feel much like talking to anyone, so I didn’t plan on making my presence known and neither of them had noticed me yet.  Cliff got his food and left, but Veronica turned around as she was balancing the last bag on her overflowing cart and saw me.  “Jack!”

I managed a half-hearted smile.  “Hey.”

Vero stepped aside and waited while the guy in front of me checked out.  She talked to me while I followed him.  “Are you okay?  Nobody’s seen you in weeks.”

“I’m fine.”

She gave me that look.  “`Fine’ you’re not fine, or `fine’ you’re dealing with it?”

“The latter.”

She sighed in frustration.  “Jack, if you were anyone else, I’d say you weren’t okay because you’ve just disappeared for two weeks, but you kinda do this all the time.  Are you sure you’re okay?”

I nodded, bagging the last of my groceries as quickly as I could.  I still didn’t know what I wanted to do about Arcade, but I certainly was in no mood to be out in public chatting, even to Vero.  I needed to think.  It had been weeks, if he wasn’t dead yet, I probably didn’t have much time.  All the Christmas decorations and holiday spirit, even across the world from my home in a country where such traditions were so very different and there wasn’t even a trace of snow, it reminded me of family and lovers, and everyone I had lost.  Even, perhaps especially, the one who might not be lost permanently.  I needed to come up with something very soon, or he _would_ be lost forever.  

Veronica accepted my assurances.  “Okay.  …well, if you ever need to talk, feel free to swing by Gibson’s, it’s about the only place left to hang out anymore.”

We parted ways.  She got into a brown SUV I’d never seen before and drove away and I set off up the long walk back home.  I hadn’t gotten more than I could carry, but I could carry a lot, and it was a hot day, for the winter.  Lost in my thoughts and trying not to think about the growing aches of my shoulders, I walked slowly.  

I didn’t see Daisy until I was standing beside her and she only noticed me around the same time.  She stood outside a house, presumably her house, staring at the sky and watching the sun set.  She’d looked sad, but noticing me, she put on a smile and I had about the same shift of expression.  “Good to see that you’re safe, Jack.”

“Yeah, you too.”  I hadn’t expected her to be as unstable as I could be, but it was still nice to confirm that she wasn’t dead.  Our conversation nearly ended there, I started to walk away and she looked back at the sky, but then I remembered that I had a question.  “Did Arcade’s gun used to belong to his father?”

Daisy looked back towards me with a frown, slowly processing that statement.  “He kept that old thing?”

I shrugged.  “He has a….had a Desert Eagle that looked really old.”  

Daisy nodded.  “That was Prosper’s.  I didn’t realize that he kept it.  I guess he always was kinda sentimental about the old thing…”

“Thanks.”  I would have offered it to her, but, if I couldn’t free Arcade in time, I wanted some reminder of him.  The man really had hardly any possessions and a medical text wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to remind me of him.  In the pocket of my cargo pants, I ran my fingers over the scratched and worn surface of the gun barrel.  I’d worn cargo pants instead of jeans just so I could hide the pistol in the pockets.  

I started to leave and half expected Daisy to call out to me.  She looked up towards me, like she was going to say something and then her gaze flicked ahead to my house.  She shut her mouth and nodded slightly in that direction.  I followed her gaze.  

The lights had just turned on in my house.  

I stopped and frowned.  That was either Vulpes, or someone had broken in and decided not to be discreet.  

Daisy would want an explanation, especially because she didn’t trust me very much.  “That’s probably my friend who dropped me off at Gibson’s the other day.”  She frowned, probably assuming that I’d found a new flame, as it were, so soon after Arcade, so I lied quickly, “I asked him to watch my dogs today, Turing’s been acting a bit odd.”  

Now Daisy was puzzled for a different reason.  “Aren’t you a vet?”

“Yeah, but I can’t determine if he’s sick or not without running tests or getting him an x-ray.  It’s better to wait a bit and not stress the animal any more.  He’s probably just upset.”

She accepted that.  Daisy fell silent for a moment and asked just before I started to walk again.  “He told you all about us, didn’t he?”

I looked back and shrugged.  “He told me a lot.”  It wasn’t a question.  I knew what I knew and they didn’t need to tell me unless they wanted to.  I wouldn’t ask.  

Daisy nodded, understanding that sentiment, and we parted ways.  

*       *       *

When I visited Jack that night, I found he’d painted a roan stallion rearing on a spectacularly colorful hill and tearing free from a tether.  He was not home when I arrived.  For a moment I did fear that he’d gone to rescue Arcade, but then I heard the front door open and both dogs rushed through the house to greet their master.  Jack usually took off his shoes when he got home, but this time he didn’t pause to do so, that was the first sign that something had broken his tactical impasse.  I heard him greet the dogs only briefly before he proceeded upstairs to speak to me.  I’d expected him to take his time, or not to realize that I was here even though I’d turned on the lights to study his most recent painting, and by the time I realized that he was coming to greet me, there was no point in moving to meet him.  

Jack walked into the studio, a level of focus and determination to his gaze that I’d only seen before when he was painting.  I knew he must be planning to rescue Arcade even before he spoke.  

*       *      *

“I’m getting Arcade out of there.”

He didn’t seem surprised, but I could practically feel his skepticism.  “Do you have a plan?”

“No.  Not yet.  If it comes to it, I’ll charge in there alone, unarmed, if I have to.”

Vulpes frowned openly.  “Jack,—”

“I can’t just leave him there.  As long as he’s still alive…  I need to get him out.  He won’t last much longer.”

His frown shifted from disapproval to confusion.  “Why do you say that?”

He sounded guarded enough that I knew I was right, even if my dream had been wrong.  “What’s been happening to him?  Do you think he’s in danger of dying before I can get to him?”

“Arcade is… surviving.”  An even more guarded response than the previous.  

I wanted to find out the details, but even if Vulpes chose to tell me, he’d probably realize that I knew more than I was letting on and admitting that I believed my dreams sometimes foretold the future just sounded ridiculous, even if I’d hinted at it before.  

I frowned, hoping that if I sounded determined enough, I could convince him to help me.  “Vulpes, I can’t get him out of there alone, but I will try if I have to.  Is there any chance you will help me?”

He scowled.  “I will not betray Caesar.  Even for you.”

I needed help.  I needed someone to help me if I had any chance at all to save Arcade, I had no chance on my own.  I never had any chance on my own.  I had to try something.  This man, nothing about him even suggested morality, but somehow I felt like he had honor.  Maybe not morals, per say, but honor.  However unscrupulous he could be, from what I had seen lately, I knew there was still some remnant of the kind boy I’d met when we were both children.  I didn’t want to believe that he would ignore a life debt.  Maybe that was naive of me.  “Arcade saved your life, Vulpes.  He saved my life too.”  

He froze.  From the glare he gave me I could tell that that had gotten to him.  He was torn.  Eventually, the tension eased and I knew he had made a decision.  Unfortunately it was the wrong one for me.  

“So did Caesar.”

Caesar, not Lanius.  He was only loyal to Caesar, and probably only because of that.  

A ridiculous idea came to my mind.  There was nothing I could do to change his mind; I was in this alone because of his loyalty to Caesar.  Caesar was old.  Caesar was just one man, he was not immortal.  If I could get him alone...  Wait.  Caesar had kidnapped Arcade.  Why Arcade?  Granted, he was nosy.  He might well have tried to act as a vigilante and track down the Legion himself.  I could see him being reckless like that.  For someone so smart, I had to wonder how he could be so stupid sometimes.  

But I wasn’t positive that he’d gone there of his own volition, he may have been abducted, a possibility I hadn’t really considered before because it seemed so absurd.  Many people had been captured and enslaved.  Many people had been breaking into my house lately as well.  Maybe Lanius had decided to get Arcade out of the way so he could kill me, but there was still a chance that the Legion may have had some reason to want Arcade specifically.  Vulpes had mentioned that he would probably have died if left to Legion medical care.  In that case, the Legion must not have many doctors.  Or any.  If the Legion had no doctors... Caesar was old.  At least sixty.  He may well need some kind of medical attention, at the very least someone to help with arthritis or make him dentures or something.  I didn’t know much about human medicine, really.  There was no reason for the Legion to have so few doctors if they didn’t disdain medicine at least a little.  If that was the case, Caesar would want only his most loyal and trusted men to see him make use of the doctor.  He would be alone, or close to it.  And with Arcade already there…  Granted, getting to Caesar would be practically suicidal, but the Legion did not necessarily know I was now against them, and I had my dream guiding me.  Oh, they’d find out soon enough, one way or another, but only Vulpes actually knew.  

I could get in there.  I could smuggle a gun, or a knife, or maybe just go in unarmed and get a hold of a weapon once I was inside, as I usually did in my dream.  That would probably be easiest.  I could lie.  I could sneak.  I could fool them.  And then I could fight them.  I could get Arcade out, even if I had to kill Caesar in the process.  If only it was someone other than me who had to do it.  

Vulpes started to leave and then walked back into the room.  He seemed to have made another difficult decision.  “Jack.  I will avoid Caesar’s headquarters tomorrow, and I hope our paths will not cross, but I will regret it if I have to kill you.”  He started to leave again and then hesitated to explain, somewhat reluctantly, “The Legion have allied with a large and formidable gang, one of the few which may pose a minor threat to us.  They do not know that Caesar plans to enslave them once the city is taken, nor do they know that we allow neither drug use nor women soldiers.  One of my men works with their leaders, promising rewards from the Legion.  The man is not the best operative and he has both hubris and a short temper, his name is Karl.  If you glorify the Great Khans as equals to the Legion he should be easy enough to provoke.”  Vulpes took out a paper and wrote something down, handing it to me.  “This is the address of their headquarters.  They shouldn’t give you trouble, they’re generally friendly, but if they do, mention your wealth or claim that you want to buy drugs and they shouldn’t stop you.”

He started to leave for a third time and I stopped him.  “Hey.”  He looked back over his shoulder.  “If this goes badly, take care of Mila?  _She_ should at least get to be safe and happy.”

He nodded.  “Our sister has nothing to fear.”

I heard the front door open and close a few seconds after he went downstairs.  

Looking outside, I saw that the sky had clouded over as a front moved in.  Rain fell more heavily than it had in the past two weeks, an end to the unusual winter drought.  A cruise ship I hadn’t seen before pulled into the bay and I found the whole view eerily familiar.  This was the day of my dream.  


	45. Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack to the rescue...kind of. And almost everyone underestimates someone else. I'm not sure if this is action or slapstick. Graphic violence ahead, to some degree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song by Avenged Sevenfold. I've been debating swapping it with the title of the next chapter, but the heavy-metal connotation seems more suited for this chapter instead. The next chapter may be very long, I'm not sure where I'm going to end it.

Crossing town in a cab, I felt like a man walking the green mile.  There were countless metaphors for approaching near-certain death, but none clung to my mind so vividly as that of the Stephen King classic.  I guess, whatever I wrote, I would always be a fan of that sort of horror.  Convincing the Khans had been more simple than I’d expected, and I planned to reach the Legion headquarters shortly before they attacked.  If my dream proved true, then maybe I’d be able to get Arcade out of harm’s way while the Khans razed the Legion buildings.  They’d probably be wiped out in the process, but it would provide the distraction I’d need to get Arcade out of there safely.  Or so I hoped.  I knew my chances were slim even if this went according to plan, and thus I didn’t really expect to make it out alive.  I couldn’t leave Arcade to die and I wasn’t the kind of man who could take down or build an army.  I was riding to my suicide, and for a change, I actually wanted to live, but not as much as I wanted to save Arcade.  Even the slightest chance that he would survive was worth my life.  

And so I rode towards my doom in the grey, stained seats in the back of a yellow cab.  

By sheer happenstance, the cabbie was the same one who’d driven me to my house when I’d first arrived in the city, and he remained just as unintelligible, though he didn’t seem to recognize me.  He knew of the Legion, or at least he knew that people didn’t come back from a certain part of the city, because he refused to get me within five blocks of my destination.  I didn’t mind.  I got out to the North, closer to the piers than the Legion, and walked from there.  

I’d planned to follow one street, drifting slightly away from the bay, but taking a truly direct path to my destination.  There was no visible reason to change that plan.  In my dream, I’d always walked there directly, I knew I could waste no time, and I’d always traveled at a brisk and constant walk along a straight path in my dream.  Maybe it was the familiar sight of the sea in the torrential rain or maybe it was whatever power let my dreams foretell the future, but I decided to change that plan.  If I jogged, or ran, I’d make the same time running along the docks, with the water by my side.  I didn’t realize how significantly that decision would change everything.  

*        *       *

I had never liked the sea, and the pouring rain did nothing to improve the day.  I would have said that it suited my mood, except that this was less climactic than real heartbreak.  I wasn’t entirely sure how attached I had been to Jack.  I did like him, and I did not wish him to die, but I still felt uncertain about the depth of my feelings.  Whether I loved him as a friend (and also happened to be romantically attracted to him) or whether I loved him romantically, it hardly mattered anymore as he would almost certainly be dead by the end of the day.  Either way, my feelings for him had been a problem from the very beginning, I had not really expected things to go as far as they had.  In my line of work, relationships of any kind became difficult.  Especially with the enemies that I had.  

Rather than lurking on a fire escape, as was my habit, I’d opted instead to stand beneath the awning of a boarded-up fish shop.  The awning kept the rain off me while I thought and waited for Picus to call.  He was due to check in soon; we had a schedule.  

Between considering the significance of Picus’ delay and pondering my concluded relationship, I was, for a change, mostly oblivious to my surroundings.  Unlike the previous times when Jack had distracted me, either in person or in my thoughts, this would end very badly for me.  

I never turned up the volume on my phone, so when it vibrated, it couldn’t be heard over the rain and I answered the call in a very quick and well practiced motion, raising my phone to my ear at just the right instant.  I heard the gunshot but had no time to register it before the cheap cellphone exploded in my hand.  I had not realized that I was no longer alone until the shot was fired, but I had not chosen this location at random.  I had ducked behind a stack of crates before my attacker could chamber a second round.  

I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, but I had seen where he was standing.  I could feasibly shoot him before he’d be able to aim at me, assuming he was alone.  If anyone was trying to kill me, it seemed unlikely that they’d have come on their own, this was almost certainly a small group of attackers, only one of whom had shot before I’d moved.  

My left ear felt bloody and I couldn’t hear out of it at all, my right ear had been slightly less deafened, but the damage was hopefully superficial.  My hand was another matter.  I had trained in using either hand in combat, making me effectively ambidextrous, but I preferred to use my left.  That wouldn’t be possible at the moment, however; the skin had been badly burned and shrapnel seemed to be embedded in my palm.  Flexing my fingers at all was agonizing, but I needed both hands to safely aim my pistol, due to the caliber.  

I’d hoped for the man to speak, giving away his location, but the only sounds were the rain and the ocean.  Either he recognized that I could possibly locate him by sound (I doubted I’d be able to, deafened as I was) or he didn’t wish the Legion to learn of this attack.  

After several minutes of silence, I heard footsteps approaching.  Many footsteps.  At least seven men encircled my location behind the crates.  A familiar and arrogant voice spoke.  

“Legatus Lanius has ordered your execution, Inculta.  Come out and face death like a man.”  It was difficult, but he shouted the words and I managed to decipher what he’d said.  

I almost rolled my eyes.  Aurelius, of Phoenix.  The man was so often an idiot, whatever his skill in combat.  If I managed to escape, he’d just admitted that his boss wanted me dead, and assassination was my forte, not his, although, I admit, Lanius had the advantage of numbers.  

I couldn’t decide if I was more outraged by Lanius for a move that could easily weaken the Legion’s position in this city, or Aurelius for his idiocy, both for what he’d just said and for aiding Lanius in this plan.  And for underestimating me so severely.  

I did not make a habit of carrying grenades, but I had one on me today, as a precaution.  It was only a smoke bomb, but I didn’t need more than a distraction.  I knew this alley like the back of my hand, with a few seconds of stealth, I could reach better cover behind the empty barrels closer to the bay, and they wouldn’t be able to flank me.  

I threw the smoke grenade.  

Evidently, my throw had perfect aim and smacked Aurelius in the face, knocking off the helmet he was always so proud of.  The idiot mistook the smoke bomb for a frag grenade and ordered his men to cover.  They, of course, followed, either because they wouldn’t risk insubordination or because they were just as stupid, and I had the chance I needed to vault the crates behind me and bolt for the barrels as the smoke poured out.  I even managed a shot that put down a legionary who’d sheltered near the edge of the smoke before the gunfight broke out in earnest.  Two of Lanius’ men must have been recruits because, having lost track of where I’d gone, they fired wildly as soon as they found cover.  The rest used my own shots to locate me and quickly honed in on my new position.  The barrels hummed with the impacts and bullets ricocheted in every direction.  

I’d been trapped since the first shot had been fired.  Without my phone, I couldn’t contact any of my own men or any other contacts I had.  I had no means of retreating without getting shot.  In any other position, I would have been quickly flanked by any competent tactician, though I might be giving Aurelius too much credit, and I had avoided that, but I still had nowhere to escape.  I was trapped, and sooner or later I would run out of bullets.  Even with the extra bullets hidden on my person, my clip was fairly small and Aurelius alone had an assault rifle with at least five magazines.  He typically carried a large amount of ammo.  I would have rather fought Lanius one-on-one.  

I wasn’t going down without a fight.  

Firing carefully and waiting for the shots I could take, I managed to take out all but Aurelius and a decanus I couldn’t recognize.  Unfortunately, between missed shots and those which failed to kill my target, this left me nearly out of bullets.  My hand impaired my aim and I’d opted for caution, so some shots had missed or hit less vital areas than I would have liked.  I had two shots left.  

My left hand had stiffened and the fingers were slow to respond.  Blood had dried, gluing my hand to the grip of my pistol, and my wrist, which had seemed mostly unharmed, kept shaking uncontrollably when I tried to aim.  I compensated as best as I could with my right arm, but using a .45, I knew I’d need to risk aiming more directly to make these last bullets count.  I waited until Aurelius paused to reload.  

Up until that moment, I had been aiming awkwardly around the side of the barrel, using my arms and keeping my body in cover as much as possible.  Standing was still out of the question, but this time I rolled to crouch slightly beside the barrels, bracing my elbow against my thigh to help steady my aim.  I hadn’t looked out from cover for several minutes, so I hadn’t clearly seen the alley opposite me, where Aurelius and the decanus stood across from each other, sheltered behind more stacks of crates.  Now that I did, I froze.  

Jack stood behind Aurelius, the centurion completely oblivious to his presence.  Either he’d moved more stealthily than I’d thought possible or the gunfire in such close-quarters had deafened not only myself, but Aurelius and his men.  Well aware that he had more ammo than I did, Aurelius kept me under near constant fire and when I stepped out to aim and hesitated, he took his opportunity without wondering why.  Luckily, Jack also chose that same moment to strike.  

Aurelius fired at least ten shots, each of which ripped through my leg and jolted agony through my body so much so that I barely registered what happened next.  

With thirty bullets in his magazine, and having just loaded a new one before this burst, he only stopped firing as his body collapsed to the pavement, the mangled remains of his skull barely recognizable atop his neck.  Jack was not unarmed.  

He had come here with Arcade’s .50 caliber pistol, which he must have reloaded.  With no experience firing such a powerful weapon, or, more likely, any gun at all, the recoil had caught him completely off-guard and after the shot that killed Aurelius, the thick barrel had slammed into his face, badly breaking his nose.  Blood streamed from his face and between having been smacked in the face and the reflexive tearing from the pain, he was both stunned and blinded.  The sound of that shot, perfectly coinciding with Aurelius’ own burst of fire, must have deafened the Scotsman as well, though not as severely as the gunfight had deafened myself or the decanus.  As the latter turned in shock to level his weapon at Jack, I seized the opportunity to bury my last two bullets in his brain.  He dropped.  

*       *       *

Whatever insanity I’d faced in all those crashes, attacks, and disasters, I had yet to actually break my nose or receive any serious face injury and I had never expected it to leave me so dazed.  I hardly registered what had happened.  From the moment I’d pulled the trigger, I’d felt my arms fly upwards and the impact briefly negated any senses I’d had.  My vision gradually returned, so blurred with tears and blood that I couldn’t tell whether or not Vulpes was okay.  The front of my face felt like I’d kissed a missile and I could feel blood absolutely pouring down my chest.  I guess it was a good thing I’d worn crappy clothes again today.  The impact that left my nose mangled and throbbing also made my teeth ache and I half thought my skull had been fractured.  It was lucky the bones of my nose hadn’t been rammed into my brain.  Blood pouring into my throat made me gag and I stumbled against a crate to cough it up.  

I hadn’t realized how little I could hear until Vulpes stifling curses gradually became audible again.  As my eyes finally cleared, I realized why.  

While I’d stumbled blindly about, he’d been splinting and bandaging a truly nightmarish ankle.  The shot I’d interrupted had been aimed at his chest, and shooting when I had must have thrown off the aim, but from the assault rifle, even less than a second of fire had done a lot of damage.  Both the tibia and fibula had been completely shattered just above the joint.  By some miracle, the larger arteries remained intact, they were practically the only strands of flesh left to connect the foot, but the tendon and everything else would need surgery.  As limb injuries went, I’d only seen worse once, when I’d studied the hoof of a horse hit by a semi.  

I stowed the bloody gun in my pocket and rushed towards him, fumbling to take out my phone.  “We need to get you to a hospital, you need surgery to fix the bone, I can pay—!”  

Vulpes was in no mood to deal with my idiocy right now.  “Put that away!  You came here to rescue Arcade, _do so_!”  He spoke with gritted teeth, pointed to the South, and then paused, apparently considering something.  He held out his hand.  “Your phone and, unless you trust that you can manage the recoil next time, that gun.  I will handle my own injury, you avoid sustaining any more.  And I’m nearly out of bullets.”  

I handed over both without question.  Somehow his own calm, despite the pain he was clearly in, calmed my own rising hysteria.  We had to focus.  In an awkward way, his focus reminded me of my mother; her sangfroid had been her means of keeping me rational in a crisis.  Vulpes’ quiet statements had the same effect on me now.  I needed to save Arcade.  If I didn’t, there was no point in any of this.  

“Be careful.”

Vulpes nodded, beginning to dial a number on the phone I had given him.  He spoke while I wiped the worst of the blood from my face and eyes.  “You need to move quickly, though I am certain that you can.  You should know… thank you.”  

I would have nodded if it wouldn’t have hurt my face.  As it was, I did what felt most natural: I snapped my hand to my forehead in a brief and somewhat informal salute before breaking into a sprint toward the Legion Headquarters. 


	46. Once Upon a Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What exactly has Arcade been doing all this time? And just how effective is Jack when he really needs to be?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song from Sleeping Beauty, it seemed appropriate given Jack's ability.

Arcade’s captivity had not been going well.  Even after being convinced to operate, the man spent much of his time going out of his way to antagonize the Legion, especially Caesar.  The frumentari were the only ones who really knew of his connection to Jack, I’d kept it quiet partly because of my role in his capture and the implications that had, given my relationship to Jack.  Admitting that I had tried to avoid taking the man as a slave would only have made me appear soft or otherwise sympathetic to the profligate cause.  Only myself and those who’d directly assisted in protecting Jack knew of his relationship with Arcade, and as only I visited Caesar in person, I alone could control the doctor by threatening Jack.  He’d quickly realized that no one else knew when no one else threatened Jack in their torture of him, and so for the first week, Lucius had to call me in on several occasions when the obstinate doctor became particularly defiant.  Apparently, no one realized what it was that I said to render him so docile and Arcade clearly understood that telling them would only put Jack in even more danger, he was beaten unconscious on more than one occasion simply because he refused to tell the praetorian guard what I did to placate him.  

However defiant he remained towards the rest of the Legion, by the end of the first week I simply arrived and he quieted down.  I mistook this for an improvement.  

With my services no longer needed and being busy not only protecting Jack but managing the incredibly intricate plans to assassinate Governor Kimball, I learned of the doctor’s antics only through anecdotes passed down from the guard.  

For the first week, Arcade’s acts of defiance had led to several tales which spread through the men like wildfire, a scandal among the Legion and quality entertainment for soldiers as willing to gossip as housewives.  I’d found such talk common in virtually all kinds of men at war.  

Initially, the big shock was that Arcade, apparently bored out of his mind, spent countless hours singing various songs, especially Christmas carols, in an effort to annoy everyone around him.  He sang intentionally out-of-tune and when Caesar himself ordered him to stop, he opted instead to sing “You’re a Mean one, Mister Grinch” _at_ the Legion’s esteemed leader until Caesar had him beaten unconscious.  

That last beating towards the end of the first week had left Arcade just a little bit quieter than before.  He’d started singing a few more times, mostly when Caesar was asleep and things were particularly uneventful at headquarters, but every time, once the guards had started to approach he had stopped, and apparently he’d given up on that idea.  

Arcade was not alone in his boredom; only the most trusted allies of the Legion were permitted direct contact with Caesar, so the praetorian guard had little to actually do.  Some trained their hounds and some just zoned out, but with Arcade confined to Caesar’s house, and the Legion’s headquarters, they had a new toy.  When the doctor wasn’t goaded into intellectual debate with their leader, or tending to his medical needs, the guards would alternate between devising new tricks to make him do and beating him to an inch of his life.  

Due to his disobedience, Arcade was allowed only the bare minimum in terms of food and water rations.  A few slaves had been given this same treatment recently, both of whom, being less valuable than Arcade, had been fed even less and the praetorian guard had come up with a new taunt which they desperately wished to test on Arcade.  Having hounds, as many in the Legion did, the guard often carried dog biscuits, particularly those who spend their boredom teaching the curs tricks.  After the singing outburst that had gotten him beaten unconscious, Arcade had been denied food for just over a day and a half.  Knowing this, the guard, of course, felt it would be highly amusing to offer him a dog biscuit.  

Demonstrating a level of resilience that I hadn’t expected from the man, Arcade had snapped, “I’m a doctor, not a dachshund!” and flatly refused any further offer until Caesar (who remained unaware of the biscuit incident) had had him fed.  It seemed a testament to Arcade’s character that he remained as unbroken as he did, and I found I admired the man a bit more every day I heard of his continued defiance.  Unfortunately, his spirit was not so unbreakable as he willed it to be.  

*       *       *

I hadn’t expected captivity to be easy, but I lost track of the days much more quickly than I’d thought I would.  Between blood loss, starvation, and the amount of times I got knocked out, half the time I was amazed I could even stand.  That improved after I stopped singing, and I hated the gratitude I couldn’t help but feel.  I couldn’t shake the truth that I’d saved the Legion’s _leader_ to keep Jack safe, and he probably wasn’t safe if I knew anything about how conniving and manipulative Vulpes always was.  If Caesar had died from his tumor, the Legion would have crumbled, and all the suffering they’d caused would finally be at an end.  Even barely able to think clearly, I’d quickly realized that Caesar was the only thing holding this group together.  Without his leadership, Caesar’s Legion would quickly fall apart.  I’d sacrificed the relative safety of the city, if not much of the world, for just the _possibility_ that Jack would be safe.  

Vulpes stopped arriving to threaten me once I stopped looking for ways to defy my captors.  I could hardly believe I was doing this.  I hadn’t given up, but I couldn’t openly antagonize the Legion any more.  I’d only get myself or Jack killed.  Only the latter really kept me in line.  

I argued philosophy with Caesar whenever possible, even though I knew that was what he wanted.  I was playing into his hands and that killed me, but when acting out in other ways nearly got me killed, I needed the chance to protest everything he did.  

In truth I was out of ideas.  Jack couldn’t get me out of here, no one I knew could have managed it.  Kept beside Caesar practically around the clock, my only hope for freedom or escape was a full-scale raid, probably by the S.W.A.T. team that would never come here because Vulpes, or Caesar, or somebody else was so good at his work.  I tried not to think that I would inevitably die here, as Caesar’s personal “pet,” and I actually convinced myself that was true for a while, but even with my nearly-relentless ability to hope, I just couldn’t keep up that illusion.  I was going to die here, either a few decades from now or much sooner.  I knew which I preferred.  There was still a chance that Caesar could die from infection, or, as I liked to hope, because his tumor had been cancerous and had already metastasized.  The later was very unlikely, but with no other skilled doctors in the Legion, if I died, I could still kill him.  It was already obvious that the Legion could control me so very easily, they just needed Vulpes to arrive and I did whatever they wanted, everyone knew I was no more dangerous than a small child at this point.  And for all I knew, Jack was already dead.  

Vulpes showed up without being called for one of the days after I’d stopped acting out.  To my surprise, he seemed almost as resigned as I had become.  The Legion still refused to give me clothes, aside from my glasses and some kind of explosive collar they’d fitted tightly around my neck.  Caesar had the key, not that he ever planned to use it, and I didn’t expect to find a good opportunity to steal it either.  Even if I could take the collar off, I wouldn’t make it out of the building, let alone out of the sprawling Legion complex.  The lack of clothes made everything a bit awkward, but I’d almost gotten used to it, and I hated that about as much as everything else.  To my great surprise, Vulpes had proved to be the most lenient of my captors, so because my ability to give a shit was particularly low when he dropped by unannounced, I managed a reasonably rebellious, “What do _you_ want?”  I spoke Latin because, as I’d quickly found out, most of the guard didn’t know more than hello and goodbye.  Whatever it suggested about my acceptance of their culture, I found the irony amusing that men who modeled themselves after Roman praetorians didn’t actually speak Latin.  I reveled in this one small freedom I still had.  

I’d half expected Vulpes to retort with some threat to Jack, as had become his customary greeting to me, but instead he said nothing.  He approached me until I started to wonder if he had some torture of his own that he wanted me to endure (aside from his threats, he had yet to actually abuse me since I’d gotten here.)  Maybe it was simple appreciation for the fact that he’d be dead twice over if I hadn’t saved his life, but he didn’t beat _or_ threaten me this time.  

“How are you feeling?”

“Peachy, thanks.”

My sarcasm went over better than I’d expected.  He tried to look just a bit more intimidating and it didn’t phase me.  “I don’t expect you to enjoy this.  Are you physically surviving?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because Jack cares.”

Now I was scared.  There was no way he was really attached to Jack.  At best, he felt some sort of possessiveness and mistook it for genuine affection in his own twisted way.  If he cared what Jack thought, he’d been having more contact with Jack than I’d expected.  I was only really here because Vulpes had captured me, was it really possible that he’d done this just to get me out of the way so he could move in on Jack?  I found it painfully easy to accept that he could be that cruel.  

“I’m not dead yet, if that’s what you mean.”

He must have picked up on the venom in my tone, because he frowned.  “I appreciate the fact that you _aren’t_ dead.  I am not certain what Jack would do if you were.”

I scoffed.  “And if I was?  What’s to stop you from lying to him, from lying to either of us?  You keep threatening his life, I don’t know why I believe you when you say he’s even still alive.”

That seemed to strike a cord.  He gave me a much colder look than his standard expression, which was really saying something.  “Do you truly believe I don’t care about him?  Jack is very much alive, and quite concerned about you, I might add.  If you do die, I will be honest with him because both of you deserve that much, but I would greatly prefer it if I do not have to share such news.”  

“Considering the last time I risked trusting you, I hope you’ll understand why I really don’t believe that.”  

Apparently, he had no rebuttal.  He left me alone for the next several days.  

*       *       *

Evidently, my failed attempt to smuggle Arcade out of the Legion compound when he’d first been captured had given the doctor the impression that I’d purposefully had him enslaved.  As a more honorable man than almost anyone seemed to realize, and owing him my life twice over, simply allowing him to be enslaved had been a difficult choice, only my loyalty to Caesar himself had forced me to take him in and I’d had to personally vouch for him to convince Caesar that he would be a better doctor than the one we’d recently killed for defiance.  Taking him alive had risked my position in the Legion, but nowhere near as much as I would have risked it to smuggle him to freedom after we’d been spotted.  At least enslaved, he remained alive, and someday he had a chance to be free again, one way or another.  

I never expected to get along with the man, although his spirit in the face of harsher treatment than most of our slaves ever experienced, had earned him my respect.  I hardly expected him to ever welcome my visits, except perhaps for news of Jack, but I would appreciate if he’d stop viewing me as some heartless sadist seeking any opportunity to make him suffer.  The idea that he thought I’d intentionally lured him into slavery hurt more than it should have.  I would have liked him to realize that I had done the best I could simply to keep him from the same fate as his friend.  

I had been unaware of the problems at the Garrett’s establishment; evidently they had aided and served several of the most prominent anti-Legion agents and Francine at least made her stance on the Legion quite clear, according to Severus, whose judgement may have been questionable.  He had occasionally fabricated crimes in order to exact revenge on people he disliked, and for all I know he may have just felt insulted by something Francine did.  It was Lanius’ men who’d handled the harassment of the Garretts and it had always been too minor an operation for me to have heard anything about it, so I only learned of it after Arcade’s capture, when I sought to discover what had drawn him here in the first place.  The job had been badly botched, unsurprisingly as it should have been handled by more experienced men.  A group of recruits and a decanus had been sent to terrorize the bar, breaking in and setting it aflame, but the idiots had failed to check that it was empty.  They’d found Francine behind the bar, armed with a shotgun, which she’d used to kill one man before the others had subdued her.  They didn’t consider her enough of a threat to kill, so they’d brought her back to the Legion headquarters, planning to use her to keep her brother under control.  Anyone with any knowledge of the twins personalities would have doubted the success of this plan, both of them had many examples in their past of extremely reckless behavior and they both held grudges.  Individually, or even together, they weren’t a significant threat, but they still had been more dangerous, reckless, and less moral than Francine’s captors had expected.  Had I been in charge, I would have fully expected what happened.  James’s attempted rescue was obvious, even as doomed as it had been, and thus the whole kidnapping had been rendered pointless.  Francine, likewise, was the sort of woman who would surely have fought to the death, as she did, to escape.  A man trained in torture might have broken her, but not Lanius.  Whatever his tactical abilities, he preferred brute force and faced with Francine’s stubborn defiance, I was not surprised that he’d lost his patience.  James, on the other hand, had met the fate of most people who not only trespassed on Legion territory but also attacked its men and were taken alive.  He’d been crucified and the corpse burned and stored where Jack had found it.  Simple trespassers and more passive captives served as entertainment, as did those already trained for combat who would put up more of a fight.  Blood sport had always been a favorite of Legion soldiers, though we’d had few matches lately given the police becoming more vigilant about searching for bodies.  

I could hardly have done more to help Arcade without forsaking my loyalty to the Legion, and seeing that my visits only seemed to make him more miserable, I avoided him for nearly a week.  I didn’t ignore him completely; I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t about to die and inquired somewhat regularly about his condition, always passing it off as small talk and never asking the same praetorian twice.  The consensus seemed positive, in a way: he’d quieted down.  He seemed almost obedient.  It certainly improved his chances of avoiding a fatal beating, though it suggested that his fiery spirit had been broken.  

When I left Jack’s house after telling him about the Khans, I’d gone to see Arcade.  For a change, I didn’t know exactly what I planned to say, if I planned to warn him that Jack sought to save him, or if I just wanted to be sure he was still alive so I could stop Jack if he no longer had any reason for this suicide mission he insisted on enacting.  

It was late, and Caesar had gone to sleep long ago.  The praetorian guard stood at their usual posts, though most had gotten chairs or just looked spaced out.  I’d had enough long guard shifts myself that I understood the oblivion of boredom that settled in after a few hours.  Hardly anyone met Caesar in person during the day, especially lately, and the guards stationed during the night were only there for security and emergencies.  Most flinched slightly as I entered and then settled back into position, realizing that it was just me.  Arcade had a mat on the floor in the throne room.  Slaves didn’t have beds (a mat was even a rare allotment for them), or privacy, of course, and with Caesar’s bedchamber only a few feet away, this was where Arcade spent most of his time, now that he didn’t need to be stowed in the cement cell down the hallway to be beaten.  

I’d expected that he would be asleep, which was part of why I’d chosen to come by at this hour.  If I found him asleep, I doubted I’d wake him, and that would give me the freedom to decide whether or not I wanted to tell him anything.  If I found him asleep, I would at least know he was still alive.  

And I knew he was alive when I saw him sitting up, slightly hunched over in the corner.  I simply figured that the wounds on his back, or any number of other injuries, were causing him intense pain, the curl of his spine and his slow, deliberate breathing suggested a man dealing with agony.  I didn’t know how recently he might have been beaten, so it seemed entirely plausible.  

I moved to crouch beside him, as I often did when I visited so that the guards would not hear us.  

He was not suffering from his beatings.  

Pain rendered the man oblivious to me and the reason was obvious.  His hands, blood-slicked and white-knuckled, gripped something that gleamed metallically, a small, narrow something partly buried in his abdomen.  He wasn’t dead, or even seriously injured, and as methods of suicide went, this was far more elaborate and far more lethal than I’d expected, even on the rare occasions when I had wondered if he would try to end his misery once he found defiance to be futile.  If the guards knew what he’d tried, they would beat him, possibly killing him either accidentally or intentionally.  None of them had noticed the state he was in right now.  

I clamped a hand across his mouth, smacking my arm into the side of his head just hard enough to daze him, if he wasn’t dazed already.  My other hand wrapped his own fists, pulling his arms away from his body as I forced my fingers through the gaps in his grip to tear the weapon free.  Either because he was so weakened or because he saw no point to it, he hardly resisted.  Wiping the blade clean on my sock, I saw it was a surgical scalpel.  That explained how he’d managed to obtain it.  However skilled his efforts, he’d only created a small cut, which may have been relatively deep, but had not severed any arteries.  The blood that covered his hands and dribbled down his belly as he breathed was not enough to kill him, even considering all the other injuries he’d sustained.  Lucius was very skilled in keeping slaves and prisoners alive, and after the first beating, Arcade had not truly neared death as much as I had feared that he might.  The praetorians were overly enthusiastic, but after they had nearly killed him that first time, Lucius must have kept them on a tighter leash.  This wound would not kill Arcade, though if he had continued, I knew that he had the knowledge and perhaps the determination to end himself.  Thwarted for now, I stared at the eyes above my left hand and knew it was safe to unmuzzle him.  I let him go and stood to stow the scalpel in the locked box of surgical supplies, where he would not have access to it until called on to use them again.  I did not expect that anyone would need surgery between now and when Jack would arrive, even if he took all day persuading the Khans.  

Arcade watched me in silent contempt, no motivation left to do more than glare.  I’d stopped him, and no one else had even noticed what he’d nearly done, and now he had no means of doing so again.  I grabbed a roll of bandages from the kit and returned to kneel beside him.  

“Back in the box.  _Right_.  Because I’ll never have access to it in _there_.”

“You cannot retrieve it immediately, can you?”  I wrapped the bandages around him, covering the small cut as well as his back.  It would hopefully appear as if I’d simply wrapped them that way to hold his back bandages in place, as the tape had begun to fall off.  

He recognized that I had a point.  “You stop me _now._   Why?  Do you think these jerks are really going to notice the next time I try?”

“There will not be a next time.”

He stared at me, trying to puzzle out what I meant.  “Okay…?  Are you saying you’re going to kill me yourself or just hide any and all dangerous implements for the rest of my life, because I can be very inventive—.”  

“Stop talking like that.”  I tied off the bandage and met his gaze as he replied.  

“Why?  Was that an order or were you trying to use mind control?  What the hell makes you think—?”

I slapped my hand over his mouth.  Glancing around, the praetorians didn’t seem to have heard him.  Only one could see us from his position, and that man sat so low in his chair that I felt safe to assume he’d fallen asleep.  His lolling head reinforced this suspicion.  I looked back at Arcade.  “It was merely a request.  Jack is still alive, he is safe, or he was.  He would not be happy if you took your own life, and I strongly advise against it.”  I sensed a bitter response and added, “I cannot continue being civil with you if you alert the praetorians to this discussion.”

To my surprise, he accepted that.  The fight faded from his eyes and he seemed as close to defeated as I had ever known him to look.  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”  

I very nearly slapped the doctor for those words as well as the continued implication that I wasn’t going to be honest with Jack.  Instead, I offered a compromise.  “Please.  Restrain yourself for one day.  After that, do what you will, and Jack will not know.”  If the doctor had himself set on death, I could not protect both of them, and it would be better for Jack if I simply told him that his lover had been shipped to the Ukraine.  

I grabbed Arcade’s hands rather roughly and wiped them clean, removing the last evidence of what he’d tried to do and making no effort to do so gently.  As obstinate as he had been only weeks before, he left his arms completely limp, for me to do as I saw fit.  “Thanks.”

Even with my professionally blank face, I trust that he recognized the anger in my eyes.  “To be clear, I define a day as twenty-four full hours, starting now.  _Do not preempt me on this._ ”  We both knew it was an empty threat.

*       *      *

The thought of what it would do to Jack had kept me going longer than I’d really wanted to.  I wasn’t getting out of here alive, and I wasn’t going to give Caesar the satisfaction of ending me himself, as he or whoever succeeded him inevitably would.  I refused to help keep him alive or to entertain him in the mean time.  

But, I supposed that I could wait one day, not that I had any reason to give Vulpes what he wanted either.  The man must have some reason for setting such a specific time limit, or at least I wanted to believe that he did.  For a few hours I managed to summon some level of hope that he had a reason for wanting me to wait one day.  That hope didn’t last.  I couldn’t imagine any possible reason that waiting one day would change anything.  A lot could happen in one day, but one day wasn’t going to make my situation any better.  At this point, I only had one freedom left.  

I hadn’t expected to have access to the medical kit before Vulpes’ deadline anyway, so my decision to ignore what Vulpes had asked didn’t really change the fact that I’d _have_ to wait a day, at least, now that he’d stopped my first attempt.  Well, he’d interrupted my first attempt.  I’d stopped myself.  Whatever my circumstances, whatever my technical skill and knowledge of anatomy, it turned out to be much more difficult a task than I’d expected.  I wasn’t going about this in the most efficient way, or the easiest, but this was the most lethal, if I could have completed the act.  I’d stopped before Vulpes had found me that first time.  It was more the knowledge of what I was doing that had stayed my blade than the pain itself.  Next time, I’d steel myself for it.  I wouldn’t let there be a third time.  

I had a second chance at the scalpel much earlier than I’d expected.  

I was shaken awake before sunrise on the night when Vulpes had spoken to me.  A legionary I didn’t recognize loomed over me, wearing the face mask of a decanus.  I could smell blood before I realized I wasn’t imagining it.  

“Save him,” the decanus ordered bluntly, pointing towards a man on a make-shift stretcher nearby.  He’d apparently been shot; he pressed a blood-soaked rag against his shoulder, where I could see he didn’t have any exit wound.  Another soldier explained what had happened and opened the medical kit, passing it to me quickly and calmly.  Caesar had already awakened and sat in his throne, watching expectantly, because apparently I was just supposed to sit in the corner obediently until somebody needed medical attention.  I couldn’t summon the energy to protest.  

“He was shot while patrolling a pacified region,” the soldier explained more to Caesar than to myself.  “A man affiliated with our more difficult capture as well as the Wrangler attempted to eliminate our squadron.  Six men were killed before the rebel was dealt with.”  I tried and failed to figure out who had attacked them while I tended to the wound.  

The man had been shot with a .308 round, a sniper rifle in all likelihood.  The bullet had missed everything vital, but torn his muscles pretty badly and he wouldn’t be able to aim a weapon for a while, assuming he was right-handed.  I guess they must have thought he’d been shot much more seriously because I hadn’t treated anything so mild since I’d gotten here.  It seemed like Caesar kept me on reserve for his most important agents and soldiers who would die otherwise.  I wondered if he’d been shot by Boone.  I hadn’t heard from the man in ages, not that we got along well.  I wondered how he was doing.  

It wasn’t difficult to take out the bullet and clean and suture the wound.  “You might want to avoid anything too strenuous,” I advised automatically before recognizing who I was talking to and shutting up.  Somebody would probably just kick me if I kept talking, it wasn’t like I’d actually gotten to my feet yet, and that seemed like the typical response around here.  I didn’t want to draw any attention; I’d already gotten what I’d wanted.  

The legionary stood, wincing visibly.  Oh, god, he was just a kid.  He couldn’t have been more than fifteen and he’d nearly died in combat.  I tried not to look the soldiers in the eye, half of them took that an excuse to cause me pain and it wasn’t worth that risk, but I had to fight the urge to stare at this one in horror.  How old were the rest of them?  The so-called praetorians were all grown men, but of the Legion’s army, how many were just kids, like this one?  How could they even understand what they were involved in here?  How could an army like this be allowed to _exist_?

Caesar congratulated the soldier on his bravery- apparently he’d been the one to kill their attacker, a detail I’d missed while I’d been committing surgery.  The kid practically fainted in awe, and I couldn’t be sure if I felt more pity or disgust.  Caesar told him not to tell others how he’d been healed, an order he’d given everyone else I’d saved, and the kid apparently took that to heart.  

“Thank you, Mighty Caesar.”  The kid knelt pathetically and Caesar dismissed him.  The man was sick.  Who could even _be_ so egomaniacal that they’d raise children, not only to kill people, but to worship them as a god?  He wasn’t going to get away with this.  He still had sutures on his head, a bandaged wound I seriously hoped would get infected.  Without me, I really hoped he’d finally die.  

I couldn’t try anything after the group of soldiers left.  With no one left but himself and the guards, Caesar tried to goad me into another philosophical debate and I obliged.  If I hadn’t, he’d have had me beaten and they would have found the scalpel I was trying to conceal beneath my hand.  I wasn’t _enthusiastic_ about the debate, that would have looked too suspicious after how glum I’d been the past few days.  They knew the state of mind I was in, or at least I think they did, they just didn’t realize that I could do anything about it.  Even if Caesar hadn’t wanted to talk to me, I couldn’t have done anything with everyone just waiting there, not doing anything in particular.  I needed a distraction.  To members of the Legion, I was furniture, less important than a dog and only to be noticed when necessary.  Those who came to see Caesar hardly looked my way, and everyone else would be focused on them.  Though I would need to work quickly, lest I be noticed and stopped again, before I could finish the deed.  I waited for the door to open.  

I didn’t need to wait long.  

The door swung open a few minutes later, opening so quickly as to startle the nearest praetorians and everyone else, for that matter.  In the dim moonlight outside, I saw a figure I did not recognize until he stepped inside.  It was Jack.  

He wore a ragged old t-shirt, loose jeans, and a grin halfway between polite and insane.  His hair had been styled more neatly than I’d ever seen it, and some of it still showed this even if his bangs had fallen completely out of place and hung into his eyes.  It was just long enough to reach now.  His breathing was heavy like he’d jogged here or sprinted; I could see his shoulders moving as he caught his breath.  Between his blazingly violet eyes, his Mona Lisa face had been rendered substantially less stunning, or maybe just stunning in a different way.  However completely he’d once appeared to be a man who couldn’t last an instant in a real fight, right now he would have looked at home in a mugshot, mostly thanks to the spectacularly broken nose that had left blood sprayed over much of his face and most of his shirt and jeans.  Fresh bruises bloomed around his right eye and upper lip.  The massive hiking boots he tended to wear fit with the rest of his worn clothing, and even the single simple earring he had in today, but his rings stood out, making his financial situation more evident than usual.  He usually wore one ring and he switched which one fairly often, but today he’d opted to wear just about every ring he owned.  Most were probably his father’s, being the kind of massive class rings that seemed so out-of-place on Jack’s elegant fingers.  His hands still looked like he’d never worked a day in his life, but the rings could almost serve as brass knuckles, which was probably the reason he’d worn them.  At least, I hoped it was, because that was the only explanation I could accept for his arrival, but I also hoped he hadn’t come here to pick such a completely suicidal fight.  He looked so uncharacteristically at-ease that I took a solid three seconds to recognize him.  The praetorians all went for their weapons and only Caesar, who’d clearly never met the man in person, greeted him calmly.  

“So the Legion’s most generous sponsor finally arrives.”

Ignoring the absolute slap-in-the-face of this statement, Jack bowed grandly, waving his arm in a flourish evoking his noble heritage.  “Ave, Mighty Caesar.”

“I like the servile attitude.  Keep it up.”  

Those few seconds broke me more than the past two weeks had managed.  I stared at Jack in absolute shock, hardly able to perceive his existence anymore and painfully aware that he hadn’t even seemed to notice me until he glanced my way.  

It was an act.  It had to be.  There was no way that Jack would help the Legion so _willingly_.  He talked to Caesar like they were good friends, as if this wasn’t the fascist, egomaniacal founder of a criminal empire built on _slavery_.  This _had_ to be a trick.  Or a hallucination.  Or a sick nightmare.  There was _no way_.  

While any shred of hope I had left started to fade, I recognized something familiar in Jack’s expression.  While he bowed, Caesar, seated on his throne, couldn’t see Jack’s face, but I could, sitting on my mat in the corner.  Jack’s gaze traced over my expression and posture and moved down, pausing on the bandages across my stomach and focusing on my hand with a strange intensity.  He only had a few seconds before Caesar cleared his throat and the two of them began a painfully amicable conversation I barely heard.  That stare gave me the uncanny feeling that Jack somehow knew what I was planning.  It was completely absurd, of course, and the very fact that he was here, casually chatting with Caesar as an apparent sponsor of the Legion’s crimes left me wondering why I even cared if he knew.  

Jack, albeit indirectly, had kept me cooperating with Caesar, and it was mainly the threat to Jack that had gotten me fucking enslaved in the first place, and now he had the audacity to stand here, openly supporting the Legion, and he didn’t even _acknowledge that I existed??!!_   I could hardly even process the level of shock, rage, and despair that I was feeling right now.  Maybe this was some sort of trick, it had to be.  No, it couldn’t be.  If Caesar himself claimed that Jack had been funding the Legion, he must have been.  Whether or not he’d done that to get here, the kind of funding that would have gotten him this warm of a fucking welcome would have paid for the death and or enslavement of too many people to _ever_ be justified.  I didn’t even know that he’d just done this recently, I’d suspected for a painfully long time he’d been willingly aiding the Legion, and now I just couldn’t deny it anymore.  Arcade, you fucking idiot, how could you be this oblivious?!  

*      *      *

The little plaster building by the docks looked exactly as I remembered it from my dreams.  I didn’t bother looking around; I already knew how to avoid the guards, I’d dreamed their routes a thousand times and I knew when the man watching the door itself would slip away to rendezvous with his lover for a moment.  Caesar would assume, and he did, that the guards had let me in as the Legion sponsor that I was, and now regretted being.  That regret compounded when I saw Arcade.  He looked broken, even if the light in his corner remained too dim for me to judge the extent of his wounds, the bandages were obvious.  He pressed his hand against the floor a little awkwardly, like he was holding something beneath it.  I tried to pretend that I couldn’t guess what it was.  Shock turned to hate when he saw me, and then to a devastated stare I’d seen every night for months and it never hurt any less.  I wasn’t going to be a coward anymore.  I had to get him out of here at any cost.  I needed to make amends.  

I knew that I couldn’t let him distract me, even if I hadn’t found it easier to try and forget the pained stare boring into me.  If I acknowledged him too openly, Caesar would question it, having me enslaved as well in the dreams that had gone the most poorly.  I feigned compliance while I compared reality to my vivid dreams.  The building was no different inside either.  The exterior had perfectly matched the image etched into my brain and inside, I vividly recalled every stain on the ornate red and gold carpet, every crack in the wood of the walls, and the grey moonlight filtering through the small and high-set windows.  The scent of the docks almost completely concealed hints of blood and antiseptic partly buried by smoke and herbs.  Someone, somewhere, was cooking breakfast.  Even the guards remained exactly as they had been in my recurring dreams, cementing the absurd idea that I really could, somehow, dream the future.  Eight of them, two with large brown cattle dogs.  All looking bored and half asleep, one actually standing in front of a chair as if he’d been sitting down before I’d gotten here.  One of the guards with a dog stood just beside me, and I waited for what I knew would happen.  

*       *       *

Jack didn’t look at me again after that first, brief, glance.  That hurt about as much as everything else, although at this point the pain was relative.  I tuned out whatever bullshit he was giving Caesar and just stared.  It took me a while to really process what was happening and that left me too overwhelmed to register what he was saying until an explosion interrupted Caesar mid-sentence.  Glass blasted through the windows behind Caesar, though the shards didn’t do any damage (unfortunately) and in the ensuing wash of noise, chaos, smoke, and dust, the dog behind Jack absolutely freaked out.  

Caesar stood while the praetorian beside Jack hushed his mutt.  “What the hell just happened?”  The old leader nodded to four of the other guards and pointed out the door.  “Get out there.  Find out what’s going on, and report back.”

While they obeyed, I caught the quizzical frown on Jacks face.  He looked completely stunned and dropped his confident facade for a moment before regaining his composure.  He bowed with a flourish while the guard beside him started to turn back towards Caesar, his dog now sitting quietly and watching Jack like an old friend.  

“Well, Lord Caesar, I know you’re a very busy man and this seems like the point at which I should take my leave.”  He spoke as he bowed, flourishing his arm out towards the guard beside him as if he didn’t realize had close he was to the man.  

“Yes,” Caesar answered distractedly, “quite.”  

The old man wasn’t even looking at Jack directly, he was more focused on the black smoke now forming several columns outside the window.  Sirens were already approaching.  

“Yes,well…” Jack continued awkwardly, almost as if stalling for time.  I saw his hesitant nature replaced by decisiveness again and he did about the last thing I’d ever expected.  

“Sic semper torbido-palli!”

Caesar turned around, understandably baffled by this ridiculous statement, just in time to see Jack end his bow with a much more deadly reverse of his flourish.  As the legionary beside him turned toward Caesar, Jack grabbed the machete from the man’s belt and flung it at Caesar.  With accuracy that was either luck or hidden skill, the blade shot through the air and buried itself in Caesar’s skull, the hilt vibrating slightly with the force of the impact.  If it hadn’t struck at such an odd angle, I would have thought this had to be a dream; it was such an absurd blockbuster stunt and so unexpected from a guy I’d never known to really pose a threat.  

Jack’s subsequent “oh shit” reaction, on the other hand, fit my expectations perfectly, and told me that he was as surprised by his apparent skill as I was.  

Caesar’s body crumpled, dropping to his knees and then slowly toppling like a deflating balloon.  Inside the room, everyone had frozen, the only sound was the chaos of fighting and fire outside.  The praetorians remaining slowly turned to Jack.  They stared, slowly processing that this rich idiot had somehow killed their god-king.  

Jack raised his hands in surrender.  “I swear, I didn’t think that would actually—.”

“ _Retribution!_ ”  As they shouted in unison, three of the guards sprinted towards Jack and the fourth had made the mistake of standing within reach of Jack’s feet.  In another show of utterly unexpected competence, Jack snapped an extremely distracting high kick which broke the praetorian’s neck and probably fractured his skull.  As the other three closed in, however, the Jack I expected reemerged.  Jack backed up, his arms in some semblance of a fighting stance, but his attitude very much one of fear and uncertainty.  Of the three men, two had machetes and one had only his fists.  It seemed miraculous that Jack only had to fight four of them, the two dogs, at least, hadn’t joined their masters.  They followed, and watched Jack, but neither seemed aggressive and the praetorians were too outraged to consider the behavior of their mutts.  

I hadn’t considered helping until now, when I shifted my fingers and nicked myself on the cool steel blade, reminding me that I had a weapon.  I don’t know if it was Stockholm Syndrome, or if I was just too pissed off at Jack to have thought of helping him right away, but as soon as I realized that I could, I knew that I had to.  Whether or not Jack had worked with the Legion, even if I just saved his life to ask him _why_ , I couldn’t watch him be killed here.  

Nobody even seemed to remember that I existed.  With all the noise outside, I didn’t bother trying to sneak up on them, I just ran forward and before the guard in front of me realized I was there, I’d slit his throat.  I wasn’t exactly a pacifist, but the violence of my own action disturbed me enough right then that I paused as he collapsed and both the remaining praetorians turned towards me, rage and shock overloading in their underdeveloped minds.  The distraction gave Jack a chance to strike.  Apparently he’d actually had some level of martial arts training, to my surprise, considering he managed a halfway decent karate chop to the side of the guy’s neck, which doesn’t usually work like they show in movies and didn’t this time.  His strike was lucky enough to hit either the vagus nerve or disrupt blood flow so that the guy stumbled (hitting either point messed with the connection of the brain to the body, that was why movies weren’t completely wrong about that.)  Jack followed that with a fast and powerful palm strike to the face.  His arms were nowhere near as strong as his legs, but again he hit the right spot and broke the guy’s nose more badly than Jack’s own nose had been broken.  The myth that the bones of the nose could be broken and pierce the brain was just that, a myth, but Jack might not necessarily know that, though in this case he got lucky.  Coughing from the neck wound, the legionary dropped to all fours, spitting blood onto the carpet.  The blow to the neck almost certainly hadn’t done that, which suggested that Jack’s second strike had caused cerebral hemorrhaging.  I wasn’t surprised to notice he’d stopped breathing a few minutes later.  

Not that we stood there to watch him die.  Now outnumbered and with both of us seeming like equal threats, apparently, the remaining legionary went after me.  Because the slightly taller guy without anything even approaching armor and only wielding a scalpel was clearly the bigger threat.  Okay, I might have been more of a threat than Jack, but he’d been proving me wrong lately.  This legionary was also the one who’d come at Jack unarmed, so maybe that showed a history of bad decisions, though I’d experienced what these guys could do without machetes, so I wasn’t too comforted by his lack of a blade.  I wasn’t overly eager to fight him with just a scalpel either, so I backed up when he charged at me.  

Maybe it was because everything had happened to quickly, or maybe just because I really wasn’t used to knife fights, but Jack thought of something I hadn’t and grabbed the machete of the guy I’d killed.  He rushed after the last praetorian as the guy launched a punch.  I blocked and instantly regretted doing so.  I hadn’t expected the praetorians to be push-overs, but given how quickly this guy had me on the ground, he must have been an expert.  His punch had been a distraction because when I raised my arms to deflect it, he snagged my wrist in the strongest grip I’d ever felt and executed a take-down I could hardly notice because of how quickly he took me from standing to slammed onto the floor on my back with my left arm painfully twisted.  I think he’d rotated the wrist to throw me off balance by pulling my shoulder and then struck my chest to knock me down.  I’d never been more grateful for those hideous carpets.  

Occupied reminding me why I avoided getting into reach of the people I had to fight, the praetorian left his back completely open.  Jack proved again that he had some level of self-defense training, although at the moment he was being an idiot about knives.  He must have been trained to use hunting knives, or maybe Bowie knives in combat, because he held the machete point down like it was one and it not only looked ridiculously like something out of a slasher film, but it just wasn’t as effective.  It was still a blade and he still had a decent knowledge of anatomy in most cases.  As tall as the praetorian was, Jack stood slightly taller, so, less than a second after I hit the ground, I was treated to a view of Jack awkwardly hovering the blade beside the man’s neck as he lined up the strike.  The praetorian might have been able to stop him if he’d turned around and hadn’t paused to laugh at how pathetic I must have looked.  Both my scalpel and glasses had flown off when he’d flung me to the ground and I didn’t bother to retrieve them immediately, which he must have mistaken for a sign that I’d given up again.  No, it was just a hope that he wouldn’t be a threat much longer.  

Jack plunged the machete into the man’s shoulder, cutting him off mid laugh.  When I say his shoulder, I don’t mean the muscle or the bone of the back, I mean that Jack, holding the machete beside the man’s head for just over a second, stabbed down between the clavicle and the scapula.  He stabbed close to the neck to avoid hitting too much muscle, I guess, but that meant that he cut the jugular vein, which spurted blood on its own.  A stab like that just wasn’t practical under most circumstances, he’d only managed it and (I hoped) only tried it because the guy was distracted so Jack could line it up and avoid hitting bone.  I think he’d been aiming for the heart and he had, almost certainly, pierced it because he pushed the blade in up to the handle, but he also completely severed the subclavian artery, if not the vein as well.  The praetorian was dead before he hit the floor and made even more of a mess than the guy whose throat I’d slit.  Jack left the machete where it was with a gesture of “it isn’t worth retrieving that one.”  I got my glasses and picked the scalpel back up before I stood, figuring that at this rate I should take the medical kit.  I didn’t think to leave right away, as much as I wanted to, I was still a bit disoriented by my thoughts about Jack and the adrenaline still ebbing from my system as well as the pain in my back, which felt like it had reopened from that fall.  I was still in crisis-mode, trying to think what I’d need to take and where or if I could clean the scalpel.  The kit had medical alcohol and I could use that and some cotton bandaging to clean the tool.  I went to do that and got interrupted when Jack hugged me.  

He realized that my back was bandaged for a reason, so the hug was more of an awkward chest press.  He snaked his arms around my own to pull me close without touching my back or shoulders and buried his face in my chest.  If my back hadn’t been completely shredded, Jack would have no doubt given me a hug that still would have been painful.  As it was, he pressed against me like he was desperate to touch me as much as possible.  I can’t say I didn’t understand that, but I wasn’t sure I understood it from him right now.  Not after what he’d been doing.  “I’m so glad you’re alive!”

I pried myself free of him and got the medical kit ready to go with Jack following me like one of his dogs.  I wasn’t going to discuss this until we were out of harm’s way, but right now one question was eating at me too much to go unsaid.  “Why did you help the Legion?”  Both Legion hounds had started following him as closely as he was following me, looking up expectantly like he was holding a steak dinner.  I frowned a bit more curiously at Jack.  “Why are they doing that?”

The scotsman dug a cloth bag out of his pocket, opening it and taking out a chunk of something vaguely meaty that managed to smell even fouler than what the Legion had been feeding me.  I wrinkled my nose as he explained.  “I knew the Legion had dogs, so I made liver treats, I’ve never met a dog these didn’t placate.”  Both brown mutts raptly watched the bag and the chunk he was holding and Jack, turning on his bubbly talking-to-pets voice stooped to reward them for not ripping him apart.  The whole explanation reminded me just a bit too strongly of the praetorians trying to get me to eat a dog treat and I tried to focus on something else.  I needed a gun and I needed clothes.  

The former was a no-go.  After searching every corpse and the rest of the building, it became clear that there wasn’t a single ranged weapon in the place, discounting throwing the machetes, as Jack had done.  By sheer luck, he’d killed Caesar and gotten me closer to freedom than I’d been in what felt like years, I had to give him some credit.  That was pretty much the only reason I hadn’t confronted him yet, aside from the amount of danger we might still be in.  We get to safety, and _then_ I give him a piece of my mind about all the insane decisions he’s made lately.  

I picked up a machete as a last resort, figuring it was better than going unarmed.  I needed clothes, but hadn’t found any of those either, aside from the Legion uniforms Caesar and his guards always wore.  I glared at one of the larger corpses.  

Jack continued to ignore the first question I’d asked him.  He followed my gaze and shrugged.  “You need to wear _something_ …”

“Yeah, but the Legion’s ridiculous costumes?  No!  I haven’t come this far just to…!”

I sighed in exasperation and Jack tilted his head.  “You might be able to fit into my clothes.  I could…?”  He started to take off his shirt and I stopped him.  The last thing I needed right now was for him to change clothes, even though if he wore a Legion uniform, I might actually be able resist his uncanny ability to charm his way out of trouble.  

Jack pulled his bloody shirt back into place while I scowled at the praetorian closest to my size.  “Fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got much longer than I'd planned; I was tempted to break chapters when Jack arrived, but it seemed too depressing to just have a chapter all about what's been happening to Arcade. I felt like the fight was almost comic relief after that.


	47. Smoke on the Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fleeing the Legion quickly becomes more tedious than frantic. Being stuck on a boat doesn't help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty sure the song this chapter gets it's name from is well known enough that I don't need to mention it.   
> I drew Jack, but my scanner's been on the fritz. I might link that and any other drawings related to this fic in the main summary once I can get them uploaded. I've drawn Jack a few times before, but he's particularly difficult, this is the first one I've liked. And it is a fairly toony style, because realism just wasn't working with him.

The Legion uniform was uncomfortable, as if they wore itchy fabric just to be more authentic.  I only put on what I had to, there was no way I was walking around in shoulder pads and armor regardless of the functionality.  I got dressed before I thought to remove the bomb collar.  I hadn’t forgotten about it, I couldn’t really; it was so tight that I couldn’t help but feel it.  I wasn’t even sure it really was a bomb, but I didn’t want to take chances with the explosive around my neck.  I wanted it off, even if it was just an empty threat.  

I turned around to find Jack leaning against Caesar’s throne, holding the key to my collar.  A subtly quirked eyebrow and tentative smirk suggested that he’d been thinking about something I really had no interest in right now considering I was not only in pain but surrounded by corpses in the middle of Legion territory with a fight of some sort going on outside.  I hoped he was horny just because he was Jack and not because I was wearing Legion clothes.  

I didn’t feel like talking to him right now, so I just reached out and took the key.  I fiddled with the collar carefully but couldn’t find or see how to open it.  Jack held out his hand.  “I know you want to do this yourself, but it’s some kind of bomb, isn’t it?  We don’t have a mirror and trying to open it blindly seems really dangerous.  Please, can’t I?”

I scowled and sighed, reluctantly handing the key back over.  Jack rotated the collar around my neck and quickly unlocked it, taking it off and handing the key back to me.  He smiled just a little.  

“Thanks,” I said flatly.  With the collar off, I pocketed the key absentmindedly and picked up the medical kit and the machete I’d grabbed earlier.  

Jack trailed behind me.  “Look,” he admitted, “I know… I know I made a lot of mistakes, and I’m sorry—.”

I rounded on him.  “Mistakes?  Jack, a mistake is leaving the stove on, or — or backing your car into a mailbox.  This is way beyond mistakes, Jack, _you helped the fucking Legion_.”  I fell silent, momentarily at a loss for words.  “I…I can’t.  I just can’t right now.  Let’s go.”  

He looked like he was on the verge of tears, but at the moment I hardly cared and he swallowed them and followed me with some semblance of composure.  

Outside we encountered just about the last person I wanted to see right now.  

Vulpes Inculta sat on a crate just opposite the door of the Legion headquarters, one leg tucked underneath him and the other awkwardly stretched out along the crate.  His ankle had a thick and very makeshift bandage soaked through almost completely with blood and he had the forcibly coherent scowl of someone in incredible pain.  Great, that made two of us.  

Compared to my machete, Inculta sat with an arsenal in his lap, and that wasn’t a euphemism.  He had three grenades, a smoke bomb, an AK-47, at least seven small clips and two drums of ammo as well as two large pistols, one of which I recognized as my own.  He had that one by his knee and offered it to me when we opened the door.  

“You should take this quickly, it has been fully loaded.”

“You don’t see any downside to handing me a loaded gun?”

He lessened his scowl to give me a quizzical look.  “Are you refusing the weapon?”

I grabbed it before he could change his mind and checked.  It was loaded.  And it was definitely my father’s gun.  I’d been wondering what happened to it when I was captured and now I thought I knew.  

Vulpes had his gaze focused on a gunfight inland of us and he nodded that way once I was armed.  The whole area reeked of smoke even more than seawater right now, someone, hopefully the cops, had finally decided to take a stand against the Legion.  A small building a block away suddenly detonated and amid the falling rubble and smoke six heavily tattooed women in biker leathers and jeans rushed by and were quickly mowed down by a handful of legionaries.  Okay, so it wasn’t the cops.  

The legionaries looked at us and paused before noticing Vulpes, who waved them on casually.  “Ave, true to Caesar,” one of them greeted us before the whole group rejoined the fray.  Lovely.  They thought we were legionaries as well.  

Vulpes looked back at us.  “I have improved our odds slightly; my men have destroyed much of the Legion’s barracks and attempted to distract the greatest threat to our survival.”  

As if refuting him, a grenade exploded down the alley, near the gunfight he’d been watching and things fell silent until a chainsaw revved.  Vulpes gathered his arsenal and struggled to stand.  Unable to use his right leg, Jack stepped forward and the rapist asshole accepted that he needed the help.  “Their efforts seem to have only worked for a short time.  I have a car nearby, however—”

From the same direction but slightly nearer to us, we heard another explosion and the distinct smell of burning gasoline.  Vulpes confirmed my fears.  “It seems the car is no longer an option.”

Vulpes and I looked at each other, both hoping that the other had some solution but Jack, halfway between our heights and standing between us, intercepted our gazes.  For an instant, I thought he’d just zoned out from the way he stared off towards the ocean, but then he suggested, “Maybe we could take a boat?”

“No,” Vulpes replied immediately.  That chainsaw revved again, closer this time, and started in earnest, quickly quieting as the teeth bit into something.  Multiple somethings.  He reconsidered.  “Perhaps a boat is our only option.  We should go now.”  

I raised an eyebrow, enjoying just about the only moment I’d really seen him look vulnerable, aside from the times he was half dead and I had saved his life.  “What?  You get seasick?”

“I…dislike liquid water.”

I looked at Jack, wondering why he’d suggested it when he seemed to have his own hydrophobic tendencies.  He got the gist and shook his head.  “I don’t like the ocean, but I’m fine with sailing as long as I don’t fall in.”  He started towards the docks and Vulpes hopped along with him, carrying the assault rifle as carefully as possible with his free arm.  I followed them holding my gun at the ready and keeping a close eye on the chaos behind us.  

Jack led us to the same dock I’d passed with Garrett.  Jack headed towards the largest of the ships and Vulpes tried to stop at the speedboat, though Jack didn’t notice at first which created an awkward moment during which both men stumbled dangerously close to the water.  Vulpes landed on his foot, which crumpled visibly.  He nearly collapsed before lifting it back up amid a string of stifled profanity in a mix of Latin, English, and what might have been Russian.  Vulpes jabbed a finger towards the speedboat.  He spoke at the same time that Jack asked if he was okay, drowning out the scotsman.  “The speedboat should be faster.”

Jack bobbled his head and answered quickly.  “Not necessarily.  That’s a cutter,” he pointed to the sailboat, “and it’s well-maintained.  The speedboat’s old and I have no way of knowing how much fuel is in the motor.  Unless you have a destination, we can’t risk it.  We don’t want to run out of fuel in the open ocean, but we can’t run out of wind.  The standard wind direction is southwest, and given that much of the Legion’s vessels seem to be—”  

He’d made enough of a point for me.  Another grenade went off down the alley behind us, this time producing an explosion within line of sight to us.  “We’re taking the sailboat.”

Vulpes accepted that, though Jack’s argument seemed to have convinced him as well.  He reluctantly hobbled towards it.  

I wasn’t the most oceanic man and as much as I wanted to escape whoever kept blowing things up and revving chainsaws behind us, now that I stood beside the rocking, shifting silvery-white ship, I wasn’t quite sure how to get onto the thing.  Was I supposed to jump?  

Jack thankfully knew what he was doing now, which would have surprised me more if I hadn’t already exceeded my ability to be shocked by him today.  He grabbed the two ropes securing the boat, pulling it closer, and wrapped them around the pier so it would stay.  Vulpes balanced very shakily on one foot while he did this, watching the boat the way I looked at Jack’s horses but glancing over his shoulder even more nervously.  “How long will this take?”

“Not long.”  Jack looked at me and gestured to the boat.  Even though it wasn’t raining right now, a storm seemed to be coming, because the sea roiled and the ship looked especially unstable.  I hesitated.  

Vulpes didn’t have the patience to balance any longer.  He picked up his broken ankle, holding it gingerly so it wouldn’t move too much, and jumped one-legged onto the ship.  He stifled another string of curses when he landed and hobbled over to sit down beside the main mast, stretching his leg out uncomfortably.  Damn him for making that look easy.  

Jack shrugged.  “Actually, jumping might be the best way to do it.  People tend to fall in if they straddle the gap too long.  I need to wait to undo the dock lines, or I’d get on and give you a hand.”  

“No, I’ve got this.”  I hadn’t got it.  I was pretty sure I’d fall in or land face down in the boat, watching the deck rock about was quite daunting.  I planted one foot on the boat with the intention of boarding much more carefully than Vulpes had, and as the ship pitched violently in a series of large waves, I fell into the sailboat, smacking into the mast and sitting down beside Vulpes, dazed and half afraid to stand.  It was a big ship.  I still wasn’t confident that I could stand and manage not to fall over the side.  Vulpes looked over at me and I stared back, daring him to laugh.  He looked less comfortable here than _I_ felt.  

In wild contrast to our own utter lack of sea-legs, Jack untied the boat in a matter of seconds and hopped inside easily as it drifted away from the dock.  He bustled about tying and untying ropes, messing with the wheel, and raising the sails.  He was right, in the strong wind, once he had things set up we picked up speed _fast_.  Even if it was big by my standards for boats, the sailboat remained uncomfortably tiny for careening wildly over much larger waves than I would have liked.  I had no idea if I could have been calm on an aircraft carrier in this weather.  It didn’t help when the rain suddenly started.  

*       *      *

I could tell from the clouds that this storm wouldn’t cause anything but wind and rain, and I’d sailed through much worse back home.  I loved sailing in storms.  The rain was light, lighter than I was used to, and in the sea air, it felt refreshing.  I guess for the same reason that I went towards the dangers I’d dreamed of, though I think I’d had enough of that sort of adventure to last a lifetime.  

I got caught up in the sailing because I was more focused on getting away than on choosing a direction, so for nearly half an hour I just worked to sail out of the bay, keeping my eyes peeled through the fog for the sailing markers I knew and, more importantly, for other ships out here before dawn.  I had a radar system much older than the one in my father’s ship, but I preferred to use my eyes as well as the radar.  In the storm, the bow would pitch violently over the waves, shooting us upwards as we crested one and then dropping us onto the next in a series of fast and exhilarating wet smacks.  No wonder I liked sailing in storms so much.  

*      *      *

Once the initial uncertainty of blindly skipping through the fog ebbed a bit, I looked over at Vulpes.  For a while we’d both been worried that the other would be seasick, or at least that seemed to be the reason he’d been watching me so closely, but luckily we were both wrong.  I was just afraid to stand up on this roller-coaster of a boat ride and Vulpes seemed to be doing everything he could to anchor himself in place; one hand clung white-knuckled to the railing beside us and the other gripped the mast almost as tightly.  Looking at him a bit more closely, I realized that not only was his left hand badly burned and cut, but so was the left side of his head.  What exactly had he done since I’d seen him a few hours ago?

Deciding that Vulpes had less to do with whether or not we survived this veritable Nantucket sleigh-ride, I looked over at Jack.  “You _can_ see where we’re going, right?”

He nodded.  “I have a radar system and a nautical map, as well as all the basic instruments to keep us going safely.”  I feared what he’d consider dangerous sailing when he said that.  “If you’d like,” Jack continued, “you can see what’s below deck, but I wouldn’t do that if you’re feeling at all seasick.  _I_ even get queasy below deck in this kind of weather, it’s better to keep your eyes on the horizon.”

“What horizon?” I replied pointedly, gesturing at the sea of fog around us.  

A terrifyingly loud horn drown out the slapping of the waves and Jack adjusted course.  “I’m taking us out through the Golden Gate and heading to sea.  Once I’m far enough from the coast, we should head _somewhere_ , got any suggestions?”

“Follow the coast south, towards L.A.  I can direct you when we get close.”  

Neither of us had expected Vulpes to pipe up with that instruction.  He looked no more comfortable on the boat, but his face had settled into an expression of focus and resignation.  

Jack already seemed to have accepted our destination, but I wasn’t so hasty.  I frowned and asked Vulpes, “Why?”

“I have…an ally in that city.  Particularly an ally who can feasibly destroy the Legion once and for all.”

“If you had allies like that, why weren’t they back at the docks, fighting the Legion fifteen minutes ago?”

He hesitated.  “My change of allegiance was not… was not premeditated.”  Great, that meant he might change sides again if things looked grim.  Well, grimmer than they already were.  I sighed and leaned against the mast.  This little boat ride could not end soon enough.  

*      *      *

“How long until we reach L.A.?”

We’d been sailing for only an hour when Arcade asked that.  We’d all fallen silent a while ago with Vulpes staring off into the fog and Arcade looking around impatiently while I sailed.  It was relatively easy sailing, really, the strong current pulled us out to sea faster than the wind could drive us.  

I shrugged.  “If we keep this pace, I’d say six or seven hours, maybe longer, but the wind might die down once we clear the storm, or it could pick up beyond the fog.  I don’t know these waters or wind patterns.”

He sighed.  “Great.”

“Once we’re out of this current, there is an auxiliary engine,” I offered, “but the gauge shows there’s not much fuel and if the wind dies completely, I’d rather have the engine as a last resort.  It might not even speed us up with as fast as we’re going right now.”

He nodded, resigning himself to a very long boat ride, and stretched out on the cushioned bulge above the companionway where he and Vulpes had been sitting.  After a few minutes of jostling around as the boat skipped over the rough waters, he realized this had been a bad idea and sat back up.  We all spent a silent and uncomfortable hour until we cleared the fog.  

By this point, I hadn’t slept in over a day and I can’t imagine the others were much less exhausted.  Trying to focus on the task at hand, I took to humming old Scottish folk songs under my breath so the rock of the boat and the sound of the waves wouldn’t lull me to sleep.  

*      *     *

If the bouncing of the boat hadn’t made my back so much worse when I tried to lay down, the relative peace of finally being out of the Legion’s headquarters would have lulled me to sleep.  I’d barely gotten three hours in the past day and a half, and I hadn’t exactly had much to eat either, so being this hungry made me more tired and added to my generally foul mood.  Sleep would help that.  Food would probably help as well, though with how little I’d been eating I knew I should be careful what and how much I ate.  Maybe there were crackers in the cabin.  If nothing else, I might be able to dry off a bit if I went below deck.  The rain hadn’t stopped and even though it wasn’t raining that hard, I felt soaked and freezing.  I kept shivering whenever I wasn’t hunched forward with my arms crossed in an effort to stay warm.  Vulpes didn’t seem to care about the weather, he was still staring off at the water the way Jack watched buses when we were driving.  

I stood up.  

*      *      *

Arcade stood up, looking cold and tired and miserable.  My go-to method of helping was to cuddle when I had any idea how to help at all, and right now he didn’t seem like he’d appreciate that.  I nodded below deck.  “There should be a towel or a blanket or something somewhere onboard, almost everyone keeps something like that on boats in case people fall overboard.”  He seemed annoyed that I’d mentioned falling into the sea, so I continued before he could answer, “That isn’t likely on this ship.  We have a pretty small freeboard but I can feel that the keel must be huge when I turn, so we won’t rock side to side very much at all.  It’s difficult to capsize most modern sailboats, and this one would be even harder.  The current’s really been driving us fast, even given how much of the ship sits below the waterline.”  

I guess curiosity got the better of him.  “You really know a lot about sailing.”

I nodded.  “I wanted to race boats, when I was a kid.  I mean, that changed, obviously, but I grew up sailing when I wasn’t with my mom, so I still know a lot about it and I’m honestly pretty good at it.  I’m used to my little racing boat, though, or my dad’s windjammer, so this little thing handles a lot differently.  It’s like…  I guess it’s like driving a Cadillac when you’re used to an eighteen-wheeler and a Porsche.”

He raised an eyebrow.  “So this is a luxury sailboat?”

I shook my head.  “No, not at all, though the depth of the keel does make it a very smooth ride.  This is more like…middle-class, as ships go.  My little racer was more like a very nice sports car and the windjammer was basically a yacht.”  

His patience for conversation ebbed and he went below deck with no more reply than a quiet “huh.”  Watching him walk through the companionway really made the boat look small.  It hadn’t been designed for people as tall as myself and Arcade and he had to duck to go through the doorway and descend the stairs.  I hadn’t looked, but once he opened the door to the cabin, I realized that it was a decently sized room, though there was no saloon down there, just a short hallway of cabinets before the cabin itself.  A door to the opposite side seemed to be the head.  I probably couldn’t sail straight there, and given my friend’s lack of sea-legs, I suspected that neither of them could either.  I’d have to take a break to sleep and either we’d all pile into that small cabin or we’d need to figure something out.  

*      *      *

I’d never been on a boat of any kind before, even as a kid, so I’d never really thought that anything smaller than a yacht actually had a bedroom on board, or a bathroom for that matter, but this one had both.  I looked at the king-size bed a bit dubiously.  It filled practically the entire little room, calling to mind Jack’s bedroom and the similar lack of walking space.  Even though this bed looked clean, and comfortable, and as inviting as it really seemed at the time, I really didn’t want to sleep there right now if I would have to share it with Jack.  I still hadn’t worked my mind around just what I thought of him, all things considered, and I was too cranky and exhausted to think that through right now.  As much as I wanted to sleep, I didn’t want to risk waking up beside him, because, knowing Jack, that would make it downright impossible to hold him responsible for his actions.  I searched the cabinets down here and went back on deck carrying a box of saltines, a bottle of water, and wearing a thick blanket wrapped around my shoulders.  Vulpes looked at me when I sat down to eat, but he said nothing.  

The sail in the front of the ship whipped about violently and waves kept breaking over the bow even though the storm seemed to be passing.  As much as I liked the idea of sitting down as far from Vulpes and Jack as possible, I preferred to stay dry and avoid that noisy sail, so I decided to sit towards the back instead, on a bench slightly behind Jack.  Aside from the platform where Vulpes had taken up residence, this seemed like the spot where I was least likely to fall off the ship as we bounced through the water.  Jack looked at me as well, but he didn’t say anything and went back to sailing when I frowned at him.  

I guess it must have been because I’d always been used to staying awake for days when I had to, but even as the trip began to drag on, I didn’t fall asleep.  Vulpes hardly moved at all, just staring out across the waves and watching the horizon once the storm had cleared.  He looked like a man willing himself not to feel pain.  A larger part of me than I liked to admit appreciated his suffering.  When the storm passed, we all slowly dried off and the wild leaping of the sailboat became a much more bearable subtle rocking.  Turning to parallel the coast also helped.  

The last time I’d seen an ocean at night, I’d been on a plane, but it was more stunning out here, on deck.  Not limited to a tiny, double-paned window, I distracted myself by trying to pick out familiar constellations from the sea of stars.  It didn’t help too much in keeping me awake.  

Jack seemed to be pretty tired as well, sitting behind him, I caught occasional snippets of songs in the gusting wind.  At first he was humming, but eventually he started to sing.  It was mostly old-sounding tunes that might have been Gaelic until I heard a song I recognized.  Auld Lang Syne.  The song had always held a lot of significance for me, even aside from the fact that it reminded me of my father.  The fact that Jack sang it would have unnerved me if he hadn’t already been singing for at least two hours without repeating a single song as far as I could tell, and Auld Lang Syne was fairly easy-to-remember.  Sung so quietly in a Scottish accent, in Jack’s lovely singing voice, it became almost hypnotic and the spectacular view above the incredibly dark waves only added to that.  I found myself singing along before I realized what I was doing.  

Jack looked back at me as we finished the song.  “You sound great, I didn’t realize you could sing.”

I bit back a retort and nodded.  “I can.”  I’d wanted to ask why he hadn’t asked Caesar, and add that the Legion could have kept me like a songbird, if they’d known, but that seemed too cruel.  I doubted that Jack would have had me enslaved intentionally, though I felt loath to rule it out now; I still didn’t think he would have left me there if he knew what I’d been doing and what had happened to me.  Part of me still wanted to think that somehow I’d been right about him, and he was just a naive rich kid in _way_ over his head, but on the other hand if he’d been helping the Legion enough to earn such a warm welcome from Caesar, I couldn’t trust anything about him.  I didn’t know what to believe right now.  

As if reading my mind, Jack sighed and turned to face me.  On the open sea, there was nothing ahead of us right now, and we weren’t going as fast as we’d been sailing earlier.  

“I didn’t get you captured, just so you know.”

“Jack—”

“I tried to get you out earlier, but… it didn’t go well.  I barely got out alive.”

I opened my mouth again, but this time he continued before I started to speak.  

“I really didn’t want this to happen and I have no idea what you went though, I’m just so glad you’re alive, I was—”

“Jack.”

He paused, perfectly still, but tense, as if his life hinged on my next words.  “Yes?”

I really wanted to give him a piece of my mind, to just flip out on him and ask what the hell he’d been thinking, why he’d ever helped the Legion, and for how long.  But I was exhausted, and if I yelled at him, he’d get upset and I was afraid that would sway me.  I’d been planning to yell at him, he’d started on this topic and I had too many questions to ask about how he’d lost his mind, but this wasn’t the time, not when we were both this tired and didn’t have any room to get away from each other if we got angry.  I sighed.  “Jack, just..don’t.  Not right now.  Not until we’re both safe and reasonably well rested.”

“I’m not sure I can stay awake until we reach L.A., it might be best to drop anchor and sleep now, while the sea’s calm.”  He threw that in as a suggestion before addressing what I’d said.  “I know it’s… a lot to take in, but, for what it’s worth, I’m really sorry.  I know that doesn’t make up for…everything, I just… I love you.”  

Jack hadn’t actually said that before.  From the way he said it and from how he almost never used it in his writing, it seemed like the phrase meant a great deal to him and he wouldn’t say it unless he meant it, but Jack wasn’t exactly the most honest man, and the more I’d been thinking about it, the more it seemed like he’d intentionally distracted me more than once when I’d started asking questions he didn’t want to answer.  Granted, I did the same thing, but nowhere near as often and I didn’t conceal crimes of the same scale, like funding the Legion or carrying on a relationship with one of their head honchos.  What Jack had just said really might have won me over under other circumstances, but not now.  Right now, I wasn’t even sure I could believe him.  He’d clearly manipulated me before so I wouldn’t find out about this and now that I had, this could just be him trying to do it again.  For all I knew he’d been working with the Legion from the start, maybe our whole relationship had just been the Legion’s way to keep me from fighting them directly, but I didn’t think I was that important.  For all I knew, I was only being paranoid, but if I was, then Jack had made me that way by everything he’d done.  I couldn’t think clearly right now, I’d just say something I’d regret one way or another if we discussed this.  

I sighed in exasperation.  “Jack, I just can’t.  Not now.”  A fraction of all the anger and frustration I’d been feeling welled up inside me and I snapped at him, “I can’t understand how you could—!  What possibly…?!  Why?!!  How could you—??!  I just… I can’t even…”

“But can you odd?”

Jack and I both turned towards Vulpes, whom we’d forgotten about.  Jack seemed relieved and I treated the frumentari to the most fed-up scowl I could manage.  Vulpes had the audacity to look casually amused.  

“I felt I’d best speak up,” he continued, “not only because I suspect you might not wish for me to be present for this conversation, but also because, my ankle is partly severed and as I am the only one who knows where we’re going, it might be best to ensure that I can think clearly.”

I sighed again.  He had a point.  

Jack gestured vaguely at the sails, trying to hide that he was upset.  “I’ll, uh, bring in the sails and drop anchor and all that.”  He set about stopping the boat while I went over to Vulpes.  

The frumentari sat calmly, despite the subtle tension of his jaw that showed how much pain he was in.  If he wasn’t the only one who knew where we were going, I would have happily let him suffer.  As it was, I grudgingly got the med-kit and untied the bandage on his ankle.  

He hadn’t exaggerated the severity of the wound.  He’d been shot, and if the bullet had hit slightly farther to the front or back of his leg, he would have lost his foot.  Even as it was, if he’d waited until tomorrow to get medical attention, he would probably have needed it amputated.  Right now I wasn’t even sure I could save his foot, and the infection might be worse.  I didn’t bother to warn him when I started to clean the wound, but he managed to annoy me when he hardly flinched at all.  

I wasn’t in any mood to talk while I saved his life a third time, but Vulpes apparently felt chatty.  “I was not lying to you before,” he explained, “Jack had nothing to do with your capture.  He became deeply concerned when he learned where you were and he did attempt a rescue on his own, which he only survived because I smuggled him out of Legion territory.”  

I didn’t feel like arguing with him and I didn’t have the energy to judge the truth of his words right now.  I did what I could to reassemble the shattered bone and stitched the wound shut.  “You’ll need surgery as soon as possible to fix this, I don’t have the tools to hold the bone together properly.”  I started to splint the leg as best as I could and he nodded.  

“I should be able to find a doctor there, my contact has been known to work with one.”  He fell silent, gritting his teeth as I rebandaged everything, which pressed against the bone and probably caused more pain than he’d already been experiencing.  I tied it off, trying not to enjoy his agony too much.  

Vulpes continued as I stood and picked up the medical kit.  “You should have your own wounds cleaned.  Your back especially may get infected.”

I frowned at him.  “Since when are you the medical expert here?”

“Am I incorrect?”

I sighed.  He was right, my back felt infected already, or close to it, though it was difficult to judge the level of pain and swelling.  Still, I couldn’t exactly clean it on my own.  

“The wounds should be cleaned, should they not?  And it seems impossible to reach them yourself.”

I shot him a glare.  “Are you offering to clean my back as some kind of payment for me treating your ankle?  Because I really don’t trust you enough for that.”

He shook his head.  “No.  I already figured that you would not trust me enough for that, but the wound should be cleaned as soon as possible.”  When I didn’t seem to follow his train of thought, he suggested more bluntly.  “Jack would be willing to do that, I am positive.  And he has significantly more medical training than myself, I’m sure with your instruction—”

“Thanks for the help, but if you think I’m trusting either of you that much right now—”

Vulpes scowled at me, showing dramatically more anger than I’d expected.  “I am willing to tolerate your distrust of me, both because of how often you have saved my life and because, I admit, it is somewhat warranted, but you should not treat Jack so harshly.  He risked his life to save you, and does it not resemble your own reckless decision to travel into the Legion all but alone?  The man risked his life to save yours, despite every warning I had given him and despite the odds, and I do not doubt that he only succeeded due to his truly incredible luck.  He is not your enemy.”

I glanced up towards the bow of the ship, where Jack couldn’t hear us over the anchor chain rattling as it descended.  My bandages hadn’t been changed in days, and given the amount of area they covered, risking infection was probably risking death.  Even if I didn’t trust Jack, I didn’t believe that he’d kill me.  

*      *      *

I stopped and stood on the deck once I had the ship safely secured.  The cutter rocked almost as gently as dad’s windjammer and even knowing how much cold water surrounded us, I found it almost soporific.  It was lucky we had maps and a compass, because these stars were so foreign.  I looked up, marveling at how clear the sky managed to be even with cities and traffic back on the coast.  The sun would be rising soon, hopefully we wouldn’t be seen here and if anyone came by, particularly the coast guard, I hoped Vulpes could explain away our presence.  Especially in a stolen boat.  

My feet were sore from standing and my forced alertness was starting to ebb.  I walked over and sat beside Vulpes.  “Are you feeling alright?”

He raised an eyebrow.  “My foot is barely attached, but I’m not in quite as much pain as I was.”

“Good.”  I stared off at the darkness of the sea, glimpsing waves and gleams where things broke the surface, but unable to identify the causes.  Could be whales, could be sharks.  

“Was this a Legion boat?”

Vulpes shrugged.  “It was not a slave transport.”

I frowned.  “Aren’t those just the big container ships?”

He shook his head.  “We use some container ships in San Francisco, but smaller ships carry other slaves south, usually to be shipped out of L.A. instead.  The man we will be meeting has been interfering with slave trade there.”  

“Oh.”

“This ship _may_ be affiliated with the Legion,” Vulpes continued, “Cursor Lucullus was known to keep several boats of varying kinds for Legion activities.”  

“Oh.”  I felt even more okay with stealing it now.  If Arcade criticized me for that, at least now I’d have an explanation.  I looked around, realizing that only Vulpes and I were on deck.  “Where is Arcade?”

“I believe he went below deck.”

“Oh.  Are you planning to sleep in the cabin?”

He shook his head.  “If I sleep, I will sleep here.”  When I walked over to one of the longer cushioned benches on deck, he added.  “Arcade may need help cleaning the wounds on his back.  I believe he is tending to that now.”

I tilted my head.  “I’m not sure he’d be so keen on me helping right now.”

“He’d hardly prefer my assistance, and he has no alternative to us.”  He made a good point.  I cautiously descended to the cabin.  

I found Arcade standing in the hallway outside the cabin, probably because the cabin itself had so little room.  He’d taken off the Legion uniform and now wore khaki shorts that managed to be big on him.  Seeing that I looked puzzled, he nodded at a cabinet nearby and explained flatly, “Somebody left clothes on here and not all of them were Legion.”

“Who, the Hulk?”  The shorts reached past his knees and he’d fashioned a make-shift belt from the Legion tunic he’d been wearing just to hold the pants on.  Apparently he didn’t have the good humor to find my joke amusing.  

Aside from the shorts, Arcade only had his glasses and the bandages that covered most of his chest and abdomen.  In the hallway’s single fluorescent light, I could clearly see where blood and other fluids had soaked into the cloth and it was obvious the bandages hadn’t been changed in days.  The med kit rested already opened on a tiny table in the hallway.  It was a boat table, so really more like a shelf.  I expected Arcade to just take off the bandages, but he hesitated.  

“I’m not really sure what to think of you right now, but you know I can’t do this myself and this really isn’t the best time for me to get an infection, so just help me out with this, don’t read anything into it.  I really don’t know if I can trust you anymore, but I don’t have much choice right now, okay?”

I nodded.  I hated the fact that he treated me like an enemy, but I could understand it.  

*      *     *

I took off the bandages myself and heard Jack stifle a gasp.  I’d seen his skull opened up, but I guess this was the worst injury he’d seen since… well, probably since his father.  I had no idea how bad it looked, only how bad it felt, and it felt like my back had been run over a giant cheese grater.  Looking at the bandages, I could have guessed how it looked even if every blow hadn’t been etched into my memory.  If Jack knew what had happened and had let it happen, that was a level of evil I hadn’t wanted to believe existed, even though now I knew that it did.  But he’d nearly died getting me out of there.  Trying to judge him when I was this tired and in pain just wasn’t going to work.  

I leaned against the wall to steady myself and tried not to flinch while he worked.  I kept my back towards him, hiding the newly reopened cut on my abdomen.  A trickle of blood started tickling it’s way along my stomach and I reached towards the kit, hoping to clean and rebandage that wound while Jack did my back.  He had the only antiseptic.  Jack paused his work, noticing when I started to reach for the kit.  When I gave up, he murmured, “It’s okay.  I’ll do this.”  

He didn’t ask or theorize how my back had been injured; I didn’t know if that was good because it showed that he realized I didn’t want to talk about it, or if it meant that he already knew everything that had happened to me.  Once the wound had been cleaned, he used most of the bandages to cover it and taped the edges in place.  His bandaging was as neat as his painting; he carefully stretched each strip in perfect parallel to the last, only pressing down as much as he absolutely had to to get it to stick.  

“Done.”  I didn’t wait for him to say anything more before I turned around and picked up the antiseptic to clean out the wound on my stomach.  I tried to be nonchalant about it mostly because I didn’t want to see him feel bad for me while I was trying to stay angry with him, but I also didn’t want to have to explain what had happened.  I wasn’t going to admit how completely I’d lost hope, I didn’t even know what day it was anymore.  

Jack stared vacantly at the line of blood down my belly.  It was the same look he’d had after the car accident, just absolute horror.  I did my best to pretend that didn’t unnerve me.  

“What?”

I wiped the cut clean, wincing at the antiseptic sting.  Jack stepped forward suddenly and placed the tips of his fingers just beside the cut before I could bandage it.  His fingers barely applied any pressure at all, the way people touched expensive glass and baby birds.  Even if it hadn’t been so close to the wound, I would have still flinched at his touch.  It was low enough that it made me uncomfortable and recently I’d gotten a bit less comfortable with any contact, because it typically meant pain.  Funny how the Legion had managed to screw me up even more than my childhood.  

He looked from the wound to my face when I flinched and slowly removed his hand.  

“Sorry.  I…  How did you get this cut?”

I could have lied, or just deflected, as I usually did, but I didn’t want to bother with that right now.  He’d lied and evaded often enough that I’d rather just avoid this question.  If he asked me again, I just wouldn’t answer.  “How do you think I got this cut?”

Jack stared at me.  After a moment of looking practically wounded, he explained, “I think that you concealed the scalpel from the medical kit and, when no one was watching you, you tried to disembowel yourself.”

I stared back, absolutely dumbfounded.  The cut wasn’t even typical for that, I’d started cutting higher than I needed to, he couldn’t tell what I’d been planning just by looking at it, and there was no way he could possibly have guessed what I’d attempted in such accurate detail.  “How did you…?”  I realized the only real explanation and swore.  “That lying bastard!”

*       *       *

Ignoring the wound, Arcade stormed past me and back onto the deck, where Vulpes had stretched out, presumably to sleep.  He sat up as Arcade snapped, “Why did you tell him?”

Amazingly Vulpes must have recognized why he said this, because he frowned.  “I assure you, I did no such thing.”

“Bullshit!”

Vulpes realized he would get nowhere talking to Arcade and turned to me.  “How do you know what he did?”

“I dreamed it.”

Arcade stared at me incredulously.  “What the hell are you talking about, Jack?”

I fidgeted.  “Look.  I know it sounds…crazy, but sometimes I dream things that actually happen.  Haven’t I mentioned this before.”

“Yes, while you were hypothermic, or half-dead, or just generally unstable.  I thought you were _delirious_.  There’s no way you actually—”

To my surprise, Vulpes backed me up.  “Jack has dreamed many things which turned out to be true.  He warned me of the explosion that destroyed the newspaper tower, and his concern for your life did seem more specific that simple concern.  He has been aware of more than he could naturally know, though I was also skeptical at first.”

Arcade stared incredulously, and then shook his head and raised his hands, “I’m going to bed.  Hopefully, when I wake up, everything will be less…crazy.”

He retreated to the cabin and I lay down on the bench where I’d been planning to sleep earlier.  Vulpes stretched out to sleep as well, on the bench where he’d been sitting from the moment he set foot on the boat.  

“Why had he stopped?”

Vulpes looked over at me, but quickly realized what I meant.  “I arrived unexpectedly and returned the scalpel to the kit.  But I believe that he had already stopped before I arrived.”

“Why?”

Vulpes shrugged and looked at me.  “The man has been through a great deal in the past few weeks; his spirit was broken.  You will need to earn back his trust, you especially, but I am not certain that he trusts anyone or anything more than he has to right now.”

“I’ll need to reearn his trust?” I tilted my head, “Aren’t you going to suggest that I’d be better off with you?”

He looked away, watching the tell-tale tied to the top of the mast as it fluttered in the wind.  “You have made your choice, even if you have yet to notice that.  In case you have not noticed, I have been doing what I can to make sure that you are happy.”

I frowned at him and sat up.  “Why?”

He looked over at me, hesitant to answer.  “I… care about you.  I was sure you already knew that.”

“I do,” I explained, “I mean… you sound like you’re dying or something.”

“It _is_ unlikely that we will survive further confrontation with the Legion.”

“We can handle it.”

He frowned at me.  “Did you dream this?”

“No,” I smiled and then lay back down to sleep.  “I just have faith this time.  We’ve already survived more than I ever expected, all three of us, I’m certain that we can come through this alive.”

I don’t know when Vulpes went to sleep, I was out as soon as I closed my eyes. 


	48. Don't Get Lost in Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack and the gang have a "whale" of a time getting to Vulpes' last-ditch ally.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't resist the pun in the summary. The title is the name of a song by The Gorillaz. I got the drawing of Jack added to the summary, and there may eventually be more art of scenes from this fic.  
> (I apologize, there were several things I changed or added last minute in this and forgot to adjust the rest of the chapter to match, it should be fixed now, I'm really sorry about that. ^w^')

I woke up earlier than I expected, feeling more well rested than I had for a while.  I sighed happily and sat up to brush my hair back.  Vulpes, sitting up on the same bench where he’d slept and staring out over the sea, looked over when I woke.  

“You’re smiling.” he observed in his usual enigmatic tone.  

“I had a good dream.”  I got up to raise the anchor and set sail.  

*       *       *

I slept very deeply for a change, but I think I was just too exhausted not to sleep well once I finally had a more normal bed.  Granted, it was crammed into the cabin of a boat with a low ceiling and very little light until dawn.  I’d never been out at sea at night and it was somewhat disconcerting how complete the darkness became once I turned off the light.  Even with the location, and my back and everything I was dealing with emotionally, I slept well, probably because I’d been on the verge of passing out before hand.  

I didn’t get up once I was awake.  I was free again.  Granted, I was currently stuck on a boat with the Legion’s best spy and the boyfriend who’d been working with him, but they had let me do what I wanted so far and I didn’t expect Jack, at least, to really hold me captive anymore.  I’d come to think that I would die a slave, and I nearly had, I’d nearly made sure of that, but now it was over, just like…like a bad dream.  I was relatively safe and free.  

I wasn’t going to let the Legion remain unopposed.  Even if I hated my allies, the enemy of my enemy was my friend, and the last of the Legion had to be stopped.  

I still wasn’t sure what I thought of Jack.  I didn’t know how long he’d helped the Legion or if I could trust him at all, if I’d ever been able to trust him.  I certainly wasn’t going to let him charm his way out of this one.  And then there was still the insane idea that he somehow saw the future.  I really wanted to dismiss that as complete lunacy, but he had seemed to know things he couldn’t have, and I’d heard of experiments that had shown some evidence of clairvoyance in rare subjects, Doc Henry had even done a few of them and he believed it was possible.  I didn’t want to believe that Jack somehow knew things before they happened, but I couldn’t really dismiss the possibility.  

I listened to Jack whistling happily for a while, more than a little annoyed that he seemed so unfazed by everything.  I wondered angrily if he might have slept with the frumentari and only dismissed that because it would have been extremely difficult with a nearly-severed foot.  At least I could doubt that they’d been having sex right above me; I still couldn’t know exactly how much he had duped me.  Jack could have been involved with Vulpes before I’d even met him, actually that would make sense with how he’d been found in Legion territory, very close to their headquarters.  

Something bumped the underside of the boat, rocking it violently and shaking me out of my dismal thoughts.  I rushed onto deck.  

Vulpes sat where I’d left him, white knuckled on the railing and the mast, even though he’d been more relaxed last night.  He stared at Jack and asked in a tone closer to panic than I’d ever expected, “What was that?”

I had my gun drawn, though I had no idea what I planned to shoot at, and Vulpes just looked like he expected us to drop to the bottom of the ocean like a lead weight.  I’m sure neither of us were relieved when Jack shrugged and started up the radar that had been turned off until now.  

He said something as soon as the display opened.  I don’t know if it was “Well.” or “Whale.” but both were just as appropriate.  

A gigantic grey shape rose through the murky water and blasted a geyser of seawater almost as tall as the mast of our boat, drenching us all.  Vulpes spluttered like a wet cat while I reholstered my gun.  

“Whoa.”

The first whale turned, tilting the stubby fin on its head and the blow hole just behind it almost into the water to watch us with one massive eye.  

“Hello.”  I said it mostly out of shock and a lack of any idea how to act in this situation, I didn’t expect the animal to understand me and it didn’t, and faced with something probably twice the length of our little boat, I wasn’t very inclined to talk to it the way I spoke to dogs, even if it was sort of cute the same way Jack’s horse was sort of cute but also terrifying.  

Jack chuckled as if this was just a pushy dog and I asked to be sure, “These things aren’t likely to just knock the ship over, right?”

Jack bobbled his head.  “I don’t think they’ll try to, unless maybe there’s a juvenile, but they are very big.  I’ll try to move us very carefully to a safer distance.  I’ve never seen one this large before, it might be over a hundred feet.”

Vulpes looked even more terrified and glared at the animal like it actively had it in for him while I tried not to be too frightened by that answer.  Looking at the whale, I could tell he was probably right; the face alone must have been over twenty feet long and as it dropped underwater again, I watched an alarmingly long amount of sleek skin pass by before I saw the tail.  Another blast of spray rained on us from the left side of the boat.  There was another whale, this one maybe seventy feet, if I guessed correctly.  

“What do they do if there’s a juvenile?”

Jack shook his head, still grinning widely.  “That’s an adult as well, the big one’s just older.  I’ve never seen blue whales this big before.”

Oh.  That was why they were so enormous.  “These are blue whales?”

He nodded.  “They’re really closer to grey above the surface.  The smaller one looks to be a young male, but just in case the other’s a female, tell me if you spot any below fifty feet long.  They breed in this sort of area and pretty much anything gets dangerous if you get between a mother and baby.  Blue’s are typically pretty docile, we just need to be careful not to hit them.  The first bump was probably one of them moving the water, not touching the boat directly, but these guys can really wreck a ship under the right circumstances.  Orcas are the ones you really need to watch out for, though I can’t say I’d have sailed into a pod of blue whales intentionally, as cool as this is.”

“Jack, I would really appreciate if you enjoyed risking your life a little less while you were dragging me along for the ride.”  

He shot me a winning smile as he got back to the helm and eased us between the massive animals.  “We haven’t died yet.”

Vulpes snorted.  “But hardly for lack of trying.”  I couldn’t even pretend to disagree with him.  

With the whales behind us, Vulpes relaxed enough to look over at me and stifled a laugh at what I was wearing.  I still had the shorts I’d found as well as an annoyingly red polo shirt that was also too large.  

“What?” I asked defensively, “At least they aren’t one of the Legion’s idiotic uniforms.”

He chuckled.  “No.  Though they are Legion property.  This is not Cursor Lucullus’ ship.”  

He seemed to be talking to Jack with that statement and I looked at the scotsman, who frowned and wondered, “It is still a Legion boat?”

Vulpes nodded.  “Very much so.”  

He chuckled again and I remarked in frustration.  “If you don’t let me in on the joke, I’m going to start thinking you’re delirious.”

“The Legate was known for keeping a private vessel to personally coordinate with other branches of the Legion.”  

Jack and I both stared as it dawned on us.  “So this boat belongs to _Lanius_?”

He nodded.  “He is no doubt quite infuriated that we used his own vessel to escape him.”

For a while, I wasn’t sure if I shared his amusement or just felt disgusted to be wearing the Legate’s clothes.  Eventually, I decided that Lanius would be more insulted that a slave now had his clothing (and that his enemies and that same slave had stolen his boat) than I should be by the previous owner of my only non-Legion outfit and the boat we were on.  We couldn’t exactly change ships this far out to sea.  And I’m pretty sure Jack would win me over fast if I had to go nude.

We sailed the rest of the way south without any more problems.  Once we got close to the city, Vulpes directed us to a large port near Venice beach.  Apparently, the Legion owned a small dock there and, despite our concerns, he assured us we’d be safe.  The Legion would be disoriented and as long as his own men had done their jobs well, those left in San Francisco would be unable to contact the group in L.A.  

The boat docked more smoothly than I’d thought possible and Jack hoped out to tie it off, tightening ropes until the sailboat was almost completely stationary.  He held out a hand to me first.  I would have refused if I hadn’t expected to fall into the ocean without it.  He helped me onto the dock, which was much higher than the side of the ship and became a bit disorienting as a result.  Vulpes had significantly more trouble than I did, though Jack got back into the boat to help him disembark.  The two of them climbed onto the dock on all fours and spent nearly a minute sorting out a way that they could both walk somewhat comfortably with Jack compensating for the frumentarius’ bad leg.  They didn’t notice that we were being watched until I cleared my throat and pointed it out.  Jack could be downright oblivious sometimes, but I found it a little disconcerting that Vulpes hadn’t noticed.  

Six or seven men covered in black and white tattoos and working to tie off a few different boats on the dock around us had all been staring since we’d pulled in.  At first I’d wanted to believe they were just watching us arrive, but now I realized that they’d all completely stopped what they’d been doing.  All of them were white and wore their hair in matching dreadlocks, but their clothes at least looked pretty normal.  They didn’t seem to be Legion.  

Vulpes switched rapidly from the almost timid way he’d acted on the boat to a commanding demeanor.  “Ave.  True to Caesar.”

Vulpes had a way of blending in, but his voice was unmistakable, and these men must have recognized it because they all scrambled to stand at attention.  “Ave.”  One man awkwardly added, “sir” and the others shot him a glance the way you’d look at a person who called the president “dude.”  Vulpes retorted to the faux pas with one of his typical false-calm stares.  The man who’d slipped up dropped into a face-down bow on the filthy wood of the dock in a display that would have been hysterical if it hadn’t shown such avid support of the Legion.  

Vulpes led us off the dock blatantly ignoring the man’s frantic apologies.  He spoke some kind of creole I had trouble deciphering.  Jack waited until we had mixed into a crowd of tourists walking along a wide path that flanked a beach before he asked Vulpes, “Where exactly are we going?”

“Continue along this road for approximately two miles.”

“You know, you give directions like a GPS.  Has anyone ever told you that?”

Vulpes didn’t react to Jack’s joke and, following behind them, I realized that he was tense with pain again.  Not only that, but he wasn’t dressed heavily and he was pouring sweat.  Granted, it was pretty warm here, I was almost sweating, but this was worse.  He needed better medical attention than I could provide with just a med kit, he needed surgery and antibiotics.  I liked to think that I only cared because he was also trying to end the Legion now, but I’d started to warm to him a bit considering how he really had been the nicest to me while I’d been a slave.  As dubious a title as that was.  

I had no idea when he’d joined the Legion, and for all I knew he could have grown up with them, at least after he’d been ten years old.  That would have left him royally screwed up, and probably instilled the incredible level of loyalty he had for the Legion.  Having seen how young some of their soldiers could be, I’d started to accept that the Legion itself could have made him the monster he’d become.  

I still didn’t want to serve as his crutch myself, but watching Jack help him stirred more anger than I would have liked.  They’d both helped the Legion, right?  Let them have each other!  Why the fuck did I care?  They were fascist dicks who apparently didn’t mind slavery.  And yet, for some reason, Jack had rescued me.  Vulpes _might_ have asked him to, which was a possibility I didn’t even want to consider.  I almost thought this might all be some kind of elaborate plot to keep my hopes up, but no, it was too convoluted and ridiculous for that.  But it still might be a dream, and any minute now I’d wake up to one of the praetorians trying to get me to suck his dick, or something just as demeaning.

Vulpes led us from Venice Beach through a series of increasingly shady back alleys to some kind of run-down dark grey building with bars on the windows and a chain-link fence keeping us out of the alley it was in.  A smattering of Christmas lights decorated the front of the building, most of them dead or flickering, so they hardly added a cheery atmosphere.  Someone had graffitied what looked like a mummy on the wall beside us.  Jack stared up at the image, absolutely transfixed.   

“Vulpes, who are we meeting here?”  

Vulpes shifted his weight uncomfortably and explained.  “We are here to find the Burned Man, the Malpais Legate.  He was—”

“He was burned.”  Jack answered as if reciting a story he knew by heart.  “Joshua Graham.  Caesar had him set on fire and thrown off a highway.  He uses a gun really similar to the one you use, except that it has snake skin on the grip and there’s something written on the sides, like… Bible verse, I think.”

Vulpes and I both stared and Jack explained.  “I’ve been dreaming about him for years, but never… rarely anything specific.  I didn’t think he actually—”

*      *      *

A pistol clicked behind me and I turned as much as I could to see the source, holding Vulpes steady.  He was really starting to feel warm, I had to wonder if he had a fever.  

A man about my age stood on the other side of the fence, wearing an odd visor and leveling a pistol at us.  “Who are you, ouslander?  You Legion?”  

He had two pistols leveled at him in response before anyone replied and quickly shifted his aim away from me to switch between Vulpes and Arcade.  Between my broken nose and bloody shirt, Arcade’s visible bruises, and the fact that right now Vulpes looked like he’d just left a war zone, we were a pretty sorry bunch.  I like to think that was why he lowered his gun so quickly when I explained, “We’re not Legion anymore.”  Arcade shifted a little behind me when I said that, like he wanted to refute the fact that he’d ever been Legion, but he stayed silent for now.  

The man on the other side of the fence frowned and lowered his gun, an act that Vulpes and Arcade both reciprocated.  “We heard strange things from the Legion up North, what happened?”

I expected Vulpes to answer, but when he didn’t, I explained bluntly, “We got out.  Vulpes isn’t working with the Legion any more.”  I felt like Arcade wouldn’t want me to just openly admit that he’d been a slave.  

Vulpes added to my explanation, “Lanius tried to have me executed, the frumentari have turned on the Legion.”

“That’s good news, right?” visor guy continued, “I mean, there are lots of them, aren’t there?”

Arcade looked dubious, “Well, they’re the Legion’s spies, so I wouldn’t think there are _that_ many…—”

Vulpes cut him off and explained curtly, “The last report I received suggested that four remain alive, but the frumentari possess a wide range of weapons and explosives.  One man may also be able to turn the police against the Legion.”  

*      *      *

I frowned at Vulpes.  “Counting yourself?”

He nodded.  

“And I suppose you’re also planning to get the police to help us yourself?”

“No,” He did his best to turn to face me, “I have had a man working within the police to deter them from hampering Legion activities.  Now he must undo his past work.”  He was surprisingly forthcoming with that information.  

The guy on the other side of the fence holstered his gun and opened the gate.  “Joshua will want to speak to you.”

He guided us into the building, which didn’t seem to have electricity, judging from the candles everywhere and general scent of smoke.  I hadn’t heard of Graham until I’d been enslaved, but he seemed like some sort of Legion boogeyman, from the way the soldiers talked about him.  The man himself turned out to be less intimidating than I’d expected, despite the dramatic candlelight and bandages.  He wore a bulletproof police vest over a white shirt and jeans, but beneath the ordinary outfit, his entire body had been wrapped in bandages.  We found him methodically cleaning dozens of .45 caliber pistols.  He looked up when we entered, his eyes much more piercing than I’d expected.  Somehow it didn’t surprise me so much that this man had such a terrifying reputation.  

The guy who’d led us to Joshua explained what we’d told him and left.  Joshua glanced over me and Jack, but focused on Vulpes.  “Why did you seek me out?”

“I thought you might wish to help end the Legion.”

They had the same focused, even tone.  “The Legion is much too large for any one man, or seven, to face alone.  I have more than I can handle trying to protect the people here.”

“Caesar is dead.”

That seemed to change Joshua’s mind a bit.  “And Lanius?”

“Lanius lives,” Vulpes admitted, “but he has been wounded.”

Jack and Graham both looked at Vulpes in surprise.  “He has?”

“He was shot.”

Jack looked at me as Vulpes explained.  He seemed to have something he wanted to ask me, but he wanted to wait until Graham got caught up on everything that had happened lately.  

“Lanius has refused medical treatment beyond what the Legion offers; The wound may be badly infected.”  He shifted his weight uncomfortably and added, “Lanius had been planning to destroy the city courthouse, the center of government in San Francisco, as a symbolic effort to take the city.  He was planning this move in three days, and he may be stubborn enough that current events will not deter him.”

Graham frowned in consideration.  “If Lanius is killed now, the Legion will lose all direction.”  He pondered the decision for a moment longer and nodded.  “You have my support.  I’ll ask the Dead Horses to prepare, but they will need to stay here to defend this region while I’m gone.  You should see Daniel at his clinic, he may be able to mend that leg.”

Vulpes nodded and let go of Jack to hobble off to some other part of the building, apparently familiar with the clinic Joshua mentioned.  The Burned Man turned to me and Jack.  “If you need wounds treated, the clinic is down that hallway by the front door.  We leave in two days.  In the meantime, there is an attic room here where you can stay.  Though the Legion may be too disorganized for its members to recognize you here, I would advise caution, but you are your own men.”  

“Thanks.”

“Go with God, brothers.”

The religious farewell caught me a bit off-guard, but I tried not to show it.  With pretty much nothing else I could think to do around here, and reasonably used to boredom by this point, I headed up to the room he had mentioned.  Jack, to my mild annoyance, trailed behind me.  

The room had three cots and a battery-powered lantern turned off in one corner.  I turned on the lantern and sat down on a bed, mostly because my whole body was still a bit sore.  Jack closed the door but stayed near it, awkwardly watching me like he was torn between moving closer and giving me space.  

“What?”  Despite my annoyed tone, he moved closer and sat on the floor beside the bed I was on.  

“They did something to the Garretts, right?  That’s why you were there when they caught you?”  

I scowled at him.  “Yes.  What a lovely conversation topic, you’re so good at knowing exactly what I really want to talk about.”

“I could have been more blunt.”  Jack sighed and turned around so he could fold his arms on the edge of the bed and rest his chin against them in what was admittedly a reasonably cute pose.  He was still trying to charm me.  “You knew Lanius was injured, did you shoot him?”

*     *      *

He scowled.  “Do you really think I’d still be alive if I’d shot him?”

That confirmed my suspicions.  “It was Garrett, wasn’t it?”

That struck a nerve.  He nodded, but he seemed sad.  “He’s dead, isn’t he?  Not that you know—.”

“He was crucified.  The body was burned.”

He made a sound like he’d gagged and then the emotion ebbed and he seemed so utterly in despair that I said the only thing I could think of to cheer him up.  “Where was he shot?  Lanius isn’t getting it treated, and Vulpes nearly died from his wound when he was shot, so—”

“Yeah,” Arcade noted flatly, “he was shot in the gut and that might kill him, but I’m not sure we’re going to get that lucky.  Either way, the Garretts shouldn’t have even been involved, they weren’t a threat, they weren’t soldiers, they were just…in the way.”  

I slid up the bed and tried to hug him but backed off at the glare he gave me.  

“I…I’m sorry.”  That glare didn’t fade.  “Look, I know I’m not the most moral man, but I’m trying to change.  I only funded the Legion because of Vulpes,—”

“I’m not sure I can believe that.”

How could he have so completely lost faith in me?  I mean, I deserved some of it, but I wasn’t _that_ bad.  “Arcade, I’m not lying to you.  I only funded the Legion, and only because of Vulpes, you know I’m not loyal to organizations, only to people.  I knew him before he _joined_ the Legion, back when we were kids, and there’s still good in him,—”

“Yeah.  Buried way underneath all the sadism, murder, and fascist propaganda.”  

“Did he hurt you?  I know that he’s gotten…well, scary as fuck, since we were kids, but he promised me he wouldn’t hurt you, and I want to believe him.”

He narrowed his eyes at me.  “Jack, sometimes you really are the most gullible man I have ever met.”

*      *      *

Jack looked shocked and leaned forward, kneeling beside the bed at this point.  “What did he do?  I swear I thought—”

“Jack, he…”  I really didn’t want to admit how easily I’d been controlled, but I wasn’t going to lie to him anymore.  “He got me to behave by threatening you.  I…I fucking saved Caesar’s _life_ because he threatened to kill you.  He was the one who captured me in the first place!  I wouldn’t have even _been_ there if I hadn’t been worried that that was where you’d disappeared to!”

“I was walking.”

“For hours?  Why?!  Going where?!  How can I even be sure that you weren’t just running some errand for the Legion?”

“I was walking to calm down!”  He raised his voice, not in anger, but in panic, “I said I dreamed what you tried to do to yourself and I did, I dreamed it every fucking night since halfway through November, and it freaked me the fuck out!  I just couldn’t get that image out of my head, and once you went missing I nearly died trying to get you out of there!  I went in there unarmed, and I— I found Garrett and… and for a second, I just…. I thought that somehow that was you, and…and it broke me.  I just… I sat there staring at him until Vulpes came along and smuggled me out of there, I still don’t know how I made it out alive and no one else found me.  He did everything he could to get me to give up on you so I’d be safe, and I didn’t, I tried to think of any way I could stand a better chance and eventually, I just went in there with your father’s old gun—”

I frowned.  “How did you get that?”  He’d nearly broken down explaining what had happened, and I wanted to believe him, but after everything… I just couldn’t be sure he wasn’t lying again.  

“Vulpes gave it to me,” Jack explained, “I had it when I came to rescue you, but I ran into Vulpes along the way and ended up giving it to him.  Shooting isn’t something I’m good at.”

A thought occurred to me and I asked on the off-chance, “Jack, how did you break your nose?”

He looked sheepish.  “I, uh, I never fired a gun before…”

I stifled a laugh and lay back, running a hand over my face.  “You’re lucky you didn’t break your _arm_.”

He chuckled as well and moved up to lie partly on the bed, folding his arms under his chin and resting his chest against my legs.  I didn’t push him off, but I did prop myself up on my elbows to give him a warning look.  I was still in no mood for him to be trying anything.  But I was glad to have my father’s gun back.  The idea that it had broken his nose seemed like some mild revenge for what he’d done to me, but it sounded like he’d been through a lot emotionally, assuming he was telling the truth.  

“Vulpes rescued me on Halloween too,” Jack explained, one hand idly tracing the edge of the bandage on my stomach through the fabric of my shirt.  “The day we went to the party, I talked to this lady down the street who apparently caught and sold people to the Legion.  Vulpes bought me, got me out, and had her killed.”  The last part didn’t surprise me, but I was a bit unsettled by how casually Jack mentioned her death.  “I don’t know why he captured you, if it was his duty to the Legion or some sort of jealousy, but he’s on our side now, and he’s done a lot to help me in the past.”

I went out on a limb here.  “Jack, I know you’ve been sleeping with him, even if he really did rape you the first time.  What exactly is going on between you two and for how long?”

Jack hesitated and stared off into the corner to avoid my gaze.  “Well… the first time was after you’d sort of broken up with me after the crash with the bus, or at least I’d thought you’d broken up with me.  He broke into my house and… I didn’t actually protest, but I don’t think he would have stopped if I had?  After that, I just… I didn’t know what to say.”

“You tell us both what’s going on, preferably after deciding who you actually want a relationship with and breaking up with the other person, you don’t just—!”

“I know, I’m an indecisive prick sometimes, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” I gave him an outraged stare, “Yeah, you really are.  And you attract trouble like a god damn magnet.  You drag everyone else into these things and make stupid decisions, and I hate that I still care about you as much as I do.”

He only seemed to register one part of that rant.  Jack perked up.  “You still care about me?”

I lay back down and slid my fingers under my glasses to rub the bridge of my nose in annoyance.  “Yes, and I hate the fact that I can’t _stop_ caring about you.”

He slid a hand under my shirt and I felt another on my upper thigh before I pressed my palm against his forehead and shoved him off the bed.  “You are _not_ winning me over that easily.”  

Jack rolled back over to kneel beside the bed.  “By love, who first did prompt me to inquire;

He lent me counsel and I lent him eyes.

I am no pilot; yet, wert thou as far

As that vast shore wash'd with the farthest sea,

I would adventure for such merchandise.”

I scowled at him, ignoring his hopeful smile.  “You can recite any Shakespeare you want, I’m still mad at you.”  

He rested his chin on the side of the bed, looking serious and almost desperate.  “What can I do to prove I’ve changed?”

I sighed and closed my eyes.  “I don’t know.”  I couldn’t deal with him right now, not when he was trying so frantically to win me over that I just couldn’t think straight, and certainly not when I looked into those dazzling, violet eyes.  “Just, go occupy yourself somewhere else, leave me alone.”

He stayed there for a moment before I heard him get up and leave, closing the door behind him.  


	49. I Never Trusted Happiness as Far as I Could Throw It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack tempts fate yet again and Boone reappears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from the lyrics of "All That Hammering," there will probably only be a few more chapters, but I'm really enjoying this again and finishing the story will be bittersweet to say the least.

I dozed off at some point and woke several hours later to the distinct sound of crutches on wooden stairs.  These were old wooden crutches, not the lighter modern metal ones, so they sounded especially loud and I wasn’t too surprised when Vulpes opened the door and thumped into the room.  After looking around curiously, he asked me in mild annoyance, “Where is Jack?”

Biting back my desire to come up with a harsh retort, I just shrugged.  “I haven’t seen him in hours.”

Vulpes frowned at me and thumped a bit closer.  His leg looked like it had been set properly and put in a thin cast, even if the bandage around it seemed a bit sub-par.  “He didn’t mention anything he planned to do or see?  You can’t think of anywhere he might have gone?”

I sighed.  I really didn’t want to deal with Jack causing any more problems.  He’d caused enough trouble lately, none of us needed more.  “Any chance he just went on a walk?”

Vulpes frowned.  “I do not think that even Jack would go for a walk in a strange city when he knows dangerous people are after us, not anymore anyway.”

I locked him in a very sardonic stare.  “Really?  Because that sounds _so_ unlike Jack.”

Vulpes sat down on the bed beside mine and frowned at me.  “Jack generally takes dangerous actions when he sees no point in living, surely you realized this?  At the moment, he seems much more optimistic, or at least he did this morning.  I expected him to stay within this building, or close to it.  Actually, I had presumed that he would remain here with you, either talking to you or simply remaining near you.”

Well, I guess he hadn’t seemed like he wanted to leave, but I just didn’t want him around me right now.  The problem was that neither of us really had anywhere else to go.  

I scowled and avoided his gaze, “Somebody must have seen him leave, right?”

Mind reader that he clearly was, Vulpes frowned at me curiously.  “You directly caused him to leave, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t tell him to go out into the city, no.”  I got up, cringing as the scabs on my back reopened.  “If you didn’t need to rest that leg, I hope you know that I’d make you find him yourself.”

He frowned again, this time in more open anger.  “Jack faced the Legion unarmed, not once but twice, exclusively for you.  The second time I know for certain that he did not expect to survive.  I convinced him to support the Legion, and I fully admit that I did my best to convince him to leave you for dead, but that did not happen.  He cares about you very deeply, a fact you seem to have forgotten.  However easily he has ignored conventional morality, he is trying to learn, and trying very hard, I might add, to earn back your trust.  He did not enslave you.  He did not intentionally torment you.  He funded the Legion at my insistence and he carried on a relationship with the two of us concurrently because he was too afraid to risk losing either of us after having lost everyone else he’d ever known, as far as he knew at the time.  He chose _you_ , and I would greatly appreciate it if I do not have to watch you break his heart yet again.”

I just didn’t know where to begin deciphering that rant.  I would have dismissed it all as lies except that the normally stoic man rapidly deteriorated into a vivid range of anger, regret, frustration, and sorrow before hastily reverting to his unfeeling mask.  Somehow I hadn’t realized quite how much he actually cared about Jack until now.  

“…what?”

Vulpes nodded downstairs.  “Ask Joshua and the others if they’ve seen Jack or know where he went.”  He didn’t lose his cool a second time, in fact he almost seemed to be pretending that it had never happened.  

“…okay.”

I did as he asked.  I found Joshua in the same room that I’d last seen him, maintaining a different set of .45’s this time.  He glanced up as I entered.  “What can I do for you?”

“Hey, did you see Jack recently?  You know, the young guy who came in with Vulpes and I?”  I didn’t realize that he probably didn’t know Jack’s name until after I’d said it.  

Joshua frowned.  “He asked to join one of our scouting parties to monitor the Legion shipyards.”  

I sighed.  With a group, I wanted to think that Jack would be safe, but Vulpes had made a good point and I couldn’t be sure that what I’d said hadn’t hurt him to the point that he planned to take some crazy risk and get himself killed.  Particularly after everything he’d done, I really wanted to leave him to it.  If he tried a third time to take down the Legion unarmed, odds were that he wouldn’t survive and it would be mostly his own stupidity getting himself killed.  But I had been pretty harsh, admittedly, and like it or not, I still cared what happened to him.  Even if he died in some freak accident or had left to get a snack and was hit by a car, I would still feel awful, but having said what I’d said to him, I felt like I’d driven him out into whatever reckless course of action he’d chosen to take.  I had to find him.  

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose.  “Look, did he seem like he was going to do anything stupid?”

Joshua frowned.  “He seemed very determined to fight the Legion.  He may act recklessly, if that’s what you mean.”

I sighed again.  “Where is this shipyard?”  The last thing I needed right now was another Legion shipyard, but I couldn’t live with myself if I might have driven Jack to his death.  

Joshua gave me directions but didn’t join me, instead setting off to alter the orders he’d given to some of the his men.  From the sound of it, he’d basically taken over a large but poorly equipped street gang called the Dead Horses.  I headed for the shipyard alone, half expecting to find Jack already dead.  Even after everything he’d done, that was a reality I couldn’t stand to picture.  

*       *      *

I’d gone on without the scouting party once we reached the shipyard.  When I wasn’t doped up or distracted, I could be incredibly observant and even though I wasn’t the most nimble guy, I was very good at moving in unexpected paths.  I climbed up on top of one of the containers shortly after we arrived, giving me a good vantage point on the only ship that was there.  Five guards were easily visible, though I spotted seven more towards the back of the ship, moving between the containers.  I watched until I had a good idea of the routes they patrolled and did my best to judge where or if I could find a manifest of the cargo.  With one guy visible in the superstructure, it was a sparse crew, which made sense if they were shipping slaves.  I didn’t expect to be able to directly right the wrongs I’d committed, I couldn’t take back the money I’d given them or undo the damage it had paid for, nor could I revive the old woman I’d helped to kill, and I expected that Boone was already dead or long gone, but this was a Legion ship, and I could make sure that the Legion could never use its cargo.  The Legion used a lot of explosives, or so I concluded from my experience with Vulpes, they probably had a great deal of C-4 on board.  Having grown up hanging around with engineers and security while my mother held meetings in power plants and on supercarriers, even discounting all the time I’d spent obsessively checking ships to make sure they were seaworthy, I knew very well how to sink a ship with the right materials.  

Getting to the offices in the superstructure wasn’t difficult.  Keeping my ears tuned for footsteps and mentally tracking the paths of the guards, I easily reached it undetected.  I didn’t turn on any light, but the windows gave me enough to read by.  Files on the desk listed the legal stuff, a manifest of clothing and office supplies with nothing more dangerous than a few letter openers.  Presumably, they had those out to show the customs officer or anyone else who needed to inspect them.  It had been a long shot that I was going to find a real manifest, but on a hunch, I also checked the file cabinets in the same room.  

Bingo.  They were carrying clothes and office supplies, probably as a front to what they were really transporting.  Of the 15,000 containers aboard, 8,000 held weapons of some kind and 1,000 were packed entirely with explosives.  The manifest had a note to be especially careful with those for obvious reasons, but what really caught my attention was the additional cargo listed below all the containers.  

“1 shipment human cargo: 1 EdF, 3 AdF, 9 JuF, 1 AdM”

Somebody added another warning below that, written in an indecipherable scrawl that might not have been English with an arrow pointing to the last slave listed.  AdM.  Adult male?  In which case, there were… one man, three women, nine girls, and one old lady somewhere on this ship.  The manifest didn’t have them listed with the containers, but it didn’t say where they were actually being kept.  I’d have to find them.  

Searching for the slaves, I took the opportunity to search the containers as I went, still being careful and avoiding guards, even if doing so meant that on more than one occasion I had to shut myself in a dark shipping container packed with explosives and pray they didn’t realize the door wasn’t properly latched.  I wasn’t amazing with bombs, but the basic concept seemed simple enough.  I was lucky to find a shipment of alarm clocks and I set up charges around the ship, giving myself a few hours just in case things got really bad.  I knew the critical points of the ship, the parts where the hull was thinnest or where a breach would widen or cause the fuel to ignite.  If this had been an oil tanker, we’d really be in business, but the hull had a basic enough design and I could check the blueprints if I wasn’t sure.  If the sparse crew hadn’t clued me in, the rust and grime on critical parts of the engine would have confirmed that they didn’t really know what they were doing.  They could cruise from point A to point B, but they didn’t inspect the ship, so the charges weren’t likely to be discovered.  As it was, the thing was barely seaworthy and this trip might well have been its last even if I hadn’t taken the time to unleash my inner mad bomber.  

With the charges placed, I’d gone over the entire ship and still found nothing.  I searched again, half expecting a trap door before I found one.  In the walkway around the containers an unexpected yellow rectangle painted on the deck concealed the edge of a trap door, probably used to lower in a container of slaves.  There had to be an entrance nearby.  Again, I was right.  I crawled down a ladder and after a quick and unexpected fight, I found myself face-to-face with one of the last people I’d expected to find.  

*      *      *

Walking onto the ship, it boggled my mind that I somehow avoided detection.  Every fiber of my body was screaming to run, and I practically had a heart attack when a seagull landed behind me.  I nearly shot the gull before it flew off in surprise.  I wouldn’t have gone onboard if I hadn’t seen Jack, but now he seemed to have vanished and even though I’d paused to memorize the guards’ routes, I was beginning to doubt that I’d really seen a flash of autumn-brown hair around one of the containers.  I got to where I’d seen him and paused.  

A small panel on the wall, the kind I’d figured just held circuitry and switches for engineers to access, flapped open in the ocean breeze, revealing not circuitry but a ladder.  It wasn’t a full-size door, more like a hatch about the size of a large pizza box in total.  It wouldn’t be comfortable, but I could fit through it.  I’d had too much military training to just crawl in feet-first, so I looked down the narrow shaft.  There was a light maybe fifteen feet below me, but no sound or sign of movement.  Not that I could hear much over the noise of the sea and the city.  I did note the red of the metal floor, but tried to dismiss that as a particularly ugly paint job.  I took the risk and climbed down, closing the panel more carefully behind me.  

I dropped the last few feet to the floor when I realized the ladder ended in a tiny room before a closed metal door.  An upended folding chair lay against one wall beside a corpse that had made the metal floor slick with his blood.  The man was too short to be Jack and dressed in an iconic Legion uniform.  From the angle of the gun by his hand and the chair, I guessed that he’d been guarding the door when Jack had entered.  The whole room was barely five feet diagonally and if Jack had just climbed down quickly without looking or hadn’t seen the guy, they would have been practically touching before either could act.  Judging from the unnatural twist of the guy’s arm, the legionary had tried to shoot Jack and been kicked before he could fire, breaking his right arm.  He’d been knocked down, either from that same kick or by some other method of attack, and made the mistake of trying to shoot Jack from the floor.  It was not a good idea to make yourself a lethal threat while lying with your head on the ground a few feet away from a tall guy who’s first instinct was to kick things.  

 _Dental records_ wouldn’t be able to identify this guy anymore.  

I opened the door  and stepped through quickly so I could close it behind me when I heard Jack frantically trying to calm down a very burly naked man in a cage.  The latter looked familiar, though I tried not to study him too closely.  He’d been gagged, but even though he couldn’t speak clearly, his tone and glare certainly got the sentiment across.  He had a dirty bandage around his right arm and his jaw looked like it hadn’t quite healed from a fracture.  

The man was in one cage in front of an open and empty shipping container while a second cage held four women and nine kids, all girls.  Most were naked like the man and like most Legion slaves.  The old woman (nearly eighty) was the exception.  She had a simple and ragged dress.  I guess even the Legion didn’t want to see that.  

The women were silent, looking from me to Jack as if they just hoped we might be here to help them but didn’t want to risk pissing us off if we were only Legion soldiers out of uniform.  I knew that tentative hope very well.  Jack had the keys in his hand and I took them from him without a word.  

“Hey,” he swallowed his attempts to placate the angry man and grinned at me sheepishly.  “If any of them can shoot, they can take the gun from the guard, and they should really get off the ship fast, but I wouldn’t—”

I set the women free and unlocked the guy’s cage before Jack finished his sentence.  Whether his grudge was real or imagined, I’d hoped he’d put his freedom ahead of revenge.  That wasn’t the case.  I’d wondered if his rage might be justified, but hadn’t wanted to consider it.  Whatever he’d done, in general and to me specifically, I still cared for Jack very deeply and I couldn’t change that.  I wasn’t really sure if I loved him, per-say, but I cared about him a lot more than I’d cared for my past boyfriends.  Everything he’d done didn’t change that, it just made it painful.  I didn’t know if I’d eventually stop caring about him if we parted ways for enough time, or if, somehow, I could trust him again and it wouldn’t hurt so much that I still had to protect him when he got stuck in crazy, dangerous situations like this.  Things wouldn’t be like they used to be, I knew that much, but Jack had changed even in the short time that I’d known him.  That optimistic part of me that had somehow survived everything I’d been through flared up like a candle reigniting from embers, and I dared to hope that there was still a chance that Jack would become a good person and eventually I wouldn’t mind how deeply I cared about him.  One day, maybe I’d even be glad to love him.  

Jack’s long history of causing me nothing but trouble continued as this guy, newly freed, didn’t even take off his gag before he lunged at Jack.  He hit him with a left hook that sent the scotsman flying.  Jack smacked into the steel wall, his right shoulder making a sickening series of pops that suggested it had been briefly dislocated and shifted back into place almost instantly.  His head and back might have hit hard as well, but I couldn’t be sure.  

I glimpsed Jack look up at his attacker, cradling his shoulder.  Tears streamed from his eyes, but his face was set.  He accepted whatever this guy was dishing out.  He _deserved_ it.  

The guy walked forward as Jack didn’t even try to get up.  I saw him plant a foot on Jack’s chest and interrupted before he could put his weight down.  I elbowed him in the chest to knock him back and leveled my gun at his chest while he sprang back to his feet.  The guy was nimble as hell, probably a soldier.  Maybe special ops.  

He ripped off his gag when he saw my gun and I barely recognized Boone.  His voice jogged my memory a bit more clearly.  “Why the fuck are you defending that piece of shit?”

I managed not to sigh, but frowned a bit more disappointedly.  At this point, I was not surprised.  “What did Jack do?”

He surprised me by the fact that he actually bothered to answer.  I guess he figured I seemed like a reasonable guy and either wanted me to let him at Jack or hoped I’d shoot Jack myself.  “He’s been working with the Legion.”

I bit back the urge to say I knew that, trying to be more tactful.  “Specifically…?”

Boone snarled and Jack sat up a bit behind me, presumably so his ribcage wasn’t such an easy target.  “He had me fuckin’ _enslaved_.  He’s working with that bastard Inculta!”

I stared back at Jack, his assertions that he hadn’t enslaved anyone now fading back into the lie category when I’d almost been believing them.  He raised his hands in surrender.  “ _That_ was Vulpes.  He’d planned to kill him in my hallway, but I talked him down to slavery.”

I stared at him incredulously, but looked back at Boone when the latter tried to step around me to get at Jack.  I guess, knowing Jack, and knowing how a lot of people liked to think there was nothing worse than death, I could see why he might mistake that for a mercy.  It still pissed me off.  

“I treated your arm,” Jack offered, at this point just trying to convince us both not to kill him, “he nicked an artery, so you would have bled out if I hadn’t done that, and now you can be free again.  See?  It worked out okay, right?”

Boone scowled at Jack and then looked at me.  I could almost see him trying to gage whether or not I really would shoot him to protect Jack.  I gave him my most focused stare.  

“Don’t make me shoot you.”  Both men apparently thought I was talking to them, because Jack shut up and got very still and Boone glared critically at me.  

After a long moment, he decided, “No.  You won’t.”  The sniper tried to shoulder past me, certainly aiming to kill Jack as painfully as possible.  

In the small metal room, the gun deafened all of us for a good ten minutes, during which Jack scrambled backward into the corner behind him and I moved to stand more protectively between him and Boone, who’d stumbled backward clutching the crimson stripe my shot had left across his upper arm.  The bullet had ricocheted wildly and buried itself in a pile of insulation against the opposite wall, one of the only non-metal things in the room aside from ourselves.  I’d meant to shoot his right arm, but he’d stopped slightly before I’d fired and the bullet had only grazed him.  Boone stared at me in absolute shock and outrage while we all waited until we could hear each other again.  That one shot had doubled all my pain from being Caesar’s pet.  I hadn’t fired this gun in a while and the recoil had caught me a bit off-guard this time.  I tried not to show that I really didn’t _want_ to fire again regardless of what I was aiming at.  

I leveled the gun at his head.  “Last warning.”

Boone edged out the door, keeping me locked in one of the most vicious glares I had ever seen while I kept my gun trained on his skull.  I didn’t relax until he closed the door behind him.  

I sighed and went over to sit beside Jack.  “You had Boone fucking enslaved?  And you tried to rescue him?  Jack, you tend to baffle me, but this is a new level of insane.”

He shrugged and then winced.  “I didn’t want Vulpes to _kill_ him.  I also had no idea he would be here.”

I remembered his shoulder and reached over him to examine it, noting how awkward he got as I did so.  I misinterpreted the reason.  

“Jack, you dislocated your shoulder, I’m just making sure there’s no serious damage.”

He nodded but didn’t answer, brushing his hair out of his eyes and shifting his legs a bit.  

I sat back, certain that his shoulder should be fine and looked him in the eye.  He was blushing vividly.  I glanced down and immediately closed my eyes, rubbing the bridge of my nose in frustration.  

“Only you _would_ get a boner in a situation like this.  Are you _ever_ not horny?”

“No.  But hey, this libido has made me a billionaire, and I’d rather be rich and sex-crazed than broke and chaste.” He laughed, “Seems like a great deal in both aspects, by my mind.”

I groaned.  

I didn’t open my eyes for a moment, mostly because I was just stunned by the absurdity of the moment, so I heard rather than saw Jack lean forward.  “By the way…”  He kissed me.  Not the really passionate kiss I expected from him, but something almost shy.  Hesitant.  “Thank you.”

*      *      *

Arcade opened his eyes and stared at me.  For a painfully long moment he didn’t move or show any visible reaction.  He looked dazed.  He watched me for long enough that I worried I’d done the wrong thing.  I couldn’t help how much it turned me on that he’d not only defended me but shot Boone, practically the only other person I know who had been as anti-Legion as my doctor, but I could have restrained myself from kissing him.  Arcade was still mad at me, wasn’t he?  That had been the worst possible choice, hadn’t it?  I’d just pushed him away, again.

He tilted his head and frowned at me.  “Why did you come here anyway?”

I couldn’t decide what that meant in reaction to the kiss.  Was he just pretending that it hadn’t happened?  I answered honestly.  “I wanted to do something to fight the Legion, maybe make up a little for…for everything.”

He kept that curious frown, like he was really weighing my actions now.  “How exactly are you fighting them here?  I mean, aside from the guy by the ladder.  I mean, freeing slaves is good, if that was your plan…”

I frowned back at him.  “What else would I be doing here?  Killing Boone, so he can’t tell people who enslaved him once he gets to China?”  His slightly more serious stare suggested that he’d considered that.  “I’m not here to kill him, I thought he might already be dead, despite my efforts.  I was here to sink the ship, but I checked the manifest— the real manifest— and I had to find these guys first.”

Arcade looked a bit skeptical but less hostile.  “How exactly did you plan to sink a container ship this size on your own?”

“C-4?”  I said it as a question, but meant it as a flat response and he raised an eyebrow.  

“And you plan to get C-4 where exactly?”

I nodded upwards.  “The ship’s carrying tons of it, literally, I’ve already set up timed charges.”

Curiosity was rapidly replaced by shock.  “This ship is literally carrying _tons_ of high explosives?  _Tons_?”

I nodded.  

“Can you even _use_ C-4?”

“Well, I haven’t blown anything up before, but I did my best.”

I told Arcade how I’d set up the C-4 and he nodded in mild surprise.  “Yeah, actually, that should work.”

“Have a _little_ faith in me.”  I gave him my most winning smile.  

Arcade frowned at me.  He must have learned from Vulpes how to really make me nervous when I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.  My smile vanished.  

After a moment I spoke up again.  “We should really go, I kinda lost track of time.” 


	50. In the Bleak Midwinter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The lull before the battle, something Vulpes is very used to. Jack and Arcade have trouble waiting for Graham to take them North.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the hymn.   
> This chapter became longer than I'd expected; there should only be two more and an epilogue by my current outline, but that may change. I'm going to try to finish by October if not by September.   
> Right now, considering I only got Fallout 4 a few weeks ago and my interest in the series had more than redoubled, I expect that I'll move on to either Piebald or a new Fallout fan fiction idea I have after this is finished. I may work on both concurrently, but the best laid plans and all...

I barely resisted the urge to give Jack a long and pointed lecture on actually paying attention to when powerful explosives were set to go off.  We learned later that Boone took the guard’s gun and escorted the naked women to a safe place off the boat.  Ultimately they all ended up with the LAPD, getting clothed and treated for the wide array of injuries they all had.  Jack and I fled the container ship and waited on the beach a safe distance away, blending in with the flocks of tourists.  The container ship, luckily, had docked at the very end of a long and otherwise empty pier; it was the only ship there.  When the charges blew, nobody outside the Legion got hurt, and I had to say, it was pretty magnificent.  

Jack had placed most of the charges below the water line, so at first we just saw the ship shake and alarms sounded loud enough that we could hear them faintly where we stood.  The ship quickly dipped low into the water, the bow submerging completely and the stern tearing away from the pier as the whole thing slid out to sea.  That was when one or several of the explosive containers must have fallen over.  Suddenly the sinking got much more spectacular.  Explosion after explosion rocked the ship, eventually leaving a smoldering, steaming wreckage that sank completely and left a trail of boiling water for a few minutes after it went down.  

In the mob of tourists who rushed from the beach to our vantage point, Jack and I looked like just another group of rubberneckers, even though neither of us had phones out to record the event.  

I can’t say I wasn’t fond of explosions, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that after what the Legion had done to me, I might not have disapproved of blowing up that ship even if there had been bystanders who might have been hurt.  I felt that it might have been worth it just to stop the Legion.  Vulpes may have made Jack a worse person and gotten him to help the Legion when he otherwise would have refused, but I hadn’t left the Legion unscathed, morally speaking.  I would never have considered killing Boone before all this, even if he’d tried to kill Jack, I would have tired to incapacitate him, but I really would have put a bullet in his head today if he hadn’t backed off.  

But Jack seemed to have made Vulpes a better person, or at least the man who’d urged me to forgive Jack and all but begged me not to kill myself didn’t seem like the heartless terrorist I’d met in October.  Maybe in time all three of us would become better people.  

*       *       *

Arcade didn’t mention the kiss and he didn’t do anything to suggest that he had or hadn’t forgiven me, leaving me to stew in nerves for hours.  Watching the result of my handiwork, he seemed almost content, but afterwards he frowned, clearly thinking about something, as we walked back to Graham’s headquarters.  I didn’t dare to ask what he had on his mind.  It was entirely possible that what I’d done wouldn’t be something he could ever forgive, and I accepted that.  I would do anything I could to win him back, but if that wasn’t enough…  I’d gotten more stable in the past few months, despite everything.  Everyone I’d lost and as badly as I’d taken it before, if this was the end of our relationship, I think I might be okay.  I would take it badly, but I wouldn’t do anything stupid.  The important thing was that he was alive, and if he couldn’t forgive me, then I just hoped he’d find a better person than myself somewhere and be happy.  He’d certainly be in less danger with someone else.  

At the dimly lit building, we found Vulpes in a sort of living room, watching the news on a portable television with the young guy who’d first taken us to Joshua.  The whole set up looked less like a social get-together and more like the result of both of them having nothing else to entertain them at the moment.  Vulpes sat on a couch to prop up his ankle on a chair and the local guy sat beside him with the TV in front of them.  There was room behind the couch, and I couldn’t think of anything else to keep me occupied, so I went around to stand behind them and watch.  I leaned on the back of the seat to get a better view, inadvertently sticking out my butt a bit because the couch and TV were both pretty low.  I was reasonably surprised when Arcade walked around the sofa to stand beside me, but I guess he’d had enough boredom after the boat-ride.  

We showed up just in time for a long report on the so-called “Legion Riots” which was really just the Great Khans and frumentari fighting the Legion at their headquarters.  The report was live, and by now the fires had burned out and the fighting had stopped but most of that part of the city remained uninhabitable, strewn with bodies and rubble and a few mines that hadn’t gone off yet.  The body count was in the high hundreds, though they didn’t say how many were Legion and how many weren’t, or if anybody had been killed in the crossfire.  The news didn’t even know that Caesar was dead and they just chalked the whole thing up to a gang turf war, oblivious to the real scope of the battle.  

The local guy apparently had seen all he needed to.  He got up.  “Good news, neh?  The Legion must be wiped out with that many dead, I’ll go tell Graham.”  He paused and nodded at the empty side of the couch.  “You can sit there, if you want.”

With the local guy gone, Vulpes assured us, “Joshua knows the Legion is much larger than that, even if some of his allies are a bit…naive.”

He focused back on the news and I considered the couch.  I looked from Vulpes to Arcade and decided I was good where I was standing.  The news broke for an ad and I kept watching just because it probably wasn’t worth changing the channel to risk missing it when it came back on.  Vulpes presumably drew the same conclusion.  

Arcade moved beside me and I realized that he was leaning on the couch so we could be at eye level.  I looked over at him and found myself momentarily distracted by how perfectly his eye color matched the hue of the San Francisco Bay.  He still had that enigmatic expression, and he looked slightly in pain, probably because of his back, but as I watched he developed an almost playful smile.  I had no idea what to expect, but I hadn’t fully prepared for the kiss that followed.  

What started out fairly chaste progressed as we stood up straight and we were nearly making out when I made the mistake of hugging him.  It hurt us both, but my shoulder was nowhere near as bad as his back.  Arcade winced and broke the kiss, pulling my arms off his back as I realized what I’d done and apologized profusely.  He managed a grin despite the pain.  “I should have expected that.”  He meant it jokingly and I nearly kissed him again for that.  

Instead my hands dropped into my pockets.  I wasn’t positive that I’d get a better chance, but then I thought more carefully.  A lot had happened lately.  I didn’t want to overwhelm him as much as he seemed like he could handle that.  I slid my hands back out of my pockets, empty-handed.  I’d risk wasting the moment and wait.  

Arcade tilted his head in that adorably curious look he had.  He didn’t ask what I was doing, which was good because I didn’t want to tell him until I did it.  He must have forgiven me at last.  I didn’t know if I really deserved it, but I hoped that I could make it up to him.  

Both of us remembered quite belatedly that Vulpes was still in the room and looked over to find him resolutely focused on the TV.  

Arcade grimaced, “Sorry.”

The frumentari remained quite calm.  “I’ve seen worse.”

We frowned and exchanged a glance.  Did he mean in general or was he referring to us specifically?  He _had_ broken in fairly often…  

The news came back proclaiming a detailed report on Governor Kimball’s assassination.  All of us were pretty eager for the distraction even if we weren’t curious about what the masses knew.  

After a brief introduction, the broadcast switched to a video which showed the assassin planting the bomb which killed Kimball.  The video showed the governor’s helicopter on the ground, on a guarded helipad while a man in an engineer’s outfit approached, seemingly to inspect the copter.  He crouched and did something to a panel near the bottom of the vehicle.  Even in the footage, it just looked like he’d checked the wiring, but the angle was bad and the newscaster narrating the clip assured viewers that this was the only time that the bomb could have been placed.  The clip showed the man as he left and then rewound to zoom in on his face.  The pixelated camera image cleared up in that typical way and it was soon replaced by a police sketch which had, according to the narration, been compiled from both the video itself and eyewitness accounts.  Seeing the scowling auburn-haired face, I let out an instinctive, “Oh!  That makes sense!”

Arcade frowned at me.  “`That makes sense?’  You know that guy?”

Whatever forgiveness I might have earned, that one remark had him questioning me like a criminal again.  Granted, it was pretty deserved.  I couldn’t very well explain how I’d met Vulpes’ angry friend without also chronicling my night at the newspaper Halloween party.  

I hesitated and Vulpes came to my rescue.  “Jack visited several stores around town during his walks, my friend worked at one of them.  I mentioned to Jack that I knew he’d been there and thus he knew this man was associated with me and, as I presume he guessed, the Legion.  Cato Hostilius is one of the few frumentari surviving, as far as I know, and he helped distract Lanius, although I fear he will not be much use later as he does need to keep a low profile now that the police have such an accurate sketch.”

I barely managed not to stare at him.  He’d described that so that it would show me in the best possible light.  I mean, I didn’t expect that he wanted to flaunt the relationship we’d had, not with the three of us being cooped up together for a few days, but the way he’d said that…  Vulpes was actively trying to get me and Arcade back together.  It made me realize how much he really did care about me, and I admired how gracefully he’d let it go.  I’d made my choice, and even if Arcade’s suspicion and Vulpes’ acceptance made me wonder if I’d chosen well, I wasn’t going back on my decision.  

Arcade gave me one last wary gaze and then sighed.  “Your nose is looking worse, I should splint that.  And you should ice your shoulder.”  

Vulpes looked back at us.  “What happened to your shoulder?”

I summarized what had happened on the boat while Arcade went to the clinic to borrow the supplies he’d need to fix my nose and treat my shoulder.  Vulpes let me finish the whole story and then laughed.  He’d relaxed, either because he felt comfortable around me, or because he was on some sort of pain medication, which seemed unlikely.  This was the first time I’d heard him laugh normally in eleven years, not counting the laughs he’d forced to sound deeper.  His already high-pitched voice got higher and his natural laugh seemed ridiculous with his lethal nature, but it made me smile.  Vulpes quieted himself pretty quickly and remarked.  “Somehow I’m not surprised that you turn out to be a natural with explosives.  If Mila takes after either of us she could have a future in demolitions.”

I chuckled.  “I haven’t heard your real laugh in ages.”

He got a bit more serious, “I will not laugh naturally around anyone else.  I’d appreciate if you do not describe it to anyone.”  He looked self-conscious.  It was adorable.  

And it was gone as soon as Arcade walked into the room, carrying a box of medical supplies, and an ice pack.  He had his sleeves rolled up and looked more serious than I’d expected.  

I nodded to Vulpes who had his emotionless stare back.  “Of course.”  I guess Vulpes felt a bit less comfortable than usual having relaxed around me, he’d been slightly less cold around Arcade just a few minutes ago.  Or actually that was nearly an hour ago.  I’d lost track of time talking to him just then.  But I’d also lost track of time even more often with Arcade.  Thinking back, I wonder if part of the reason I’d chosen the doctor was simply that Vulpes so rarely relaxed around me.  I mean, when he did, it was like seeing a shooting star, or something equally rare and wonderful, but once Arcade had opened up to me, he stayed open, for the most part.  If I hadn’t been helping the Legion and made him suspicious, he would have been even more comfortable around me.  Vulpes was always just a bit on edge, and while I both appreciated and understood that, I didn’t want someone as high-strung as I was, that would just make me even more tense and I was trying to avoid having any more panic attacks.  Arcade had helped with that immensely.  

Seeing Arcade walk in with his sleeves rolled up and everything, I raised an eyebrow as soon as I’d reassured Vulpes.  “Whoa.  You look like you’re about to perform surgery, it isn’t _that_ bad, right?”

Vulpes spoke before Arcade could.  “You fired a .50 caliber handgun without training, I’m amazed you didn’t fracture your skull more seriously.”  

Arcade nodded but looked a bit surprised by Vulpes assessment.  “He’s right, you could have easily knocked yourself unconscious.  I suspect that you probably will need surgery, but considering you can breathe normally, there probably isn’t—”  

“Oh.  I haven’t been able to breathe through my nose since it happened.”

Arcade sighed.  “Jack, you really need to stop brushing off serious injury.  Although, I guess I wasn’t really in a mood to help you at the time.  I’ll have to check in case there’s blood clotted in the airways.  But first, put this on your shoulder.”  He handed me the icepack.  

I tried to put it on but winced and soon realized that I didn’t have the range of motion to do that with my left arm.  Arcade helped me while Vulpes turned off the portable TV, which had progressed from the news to some comedy cartoon while none of us had been paying attention.  He retrieved his crutches from beside the sofa and awkwardly got up, thumping a few feet across the room before Arcade asked, “Where are you going?  You should really rest that leg.”

“Upstairs.”  Arcade raised an eyebrow and Vulpes explained, “I have not slept more than three hours since the day before Jack came to your rescue.”

I looked at him in surprise and so did Arcade.  “Jeez, get some sleep.”  He looked down at the medical supplies rummaging through them for something while Vulpes resumed his progress towards the attic.  “Take care of yourself.”

This time Vulpes joined me in a stare of shock that the doctor didn’t even seem to notice.  Had he really just said that?  Did he mean it, or was it instinct after dealing with patients so often?  

That tool was apparently really elusive because Vulpes moved on before Arcade looked up and my stare had become a puzzled frown by that time.  The tool he’d found _was_ one of the smallest in the box and as a vet, I wasn’t entirely positive what it did, though I could guess.  My nose had basically caved in, or so it seemed, and this tool looked like it would help move it back into the right position.  

Arcade saw and misinterpreted my confusion, or else he just pretended to misinterpret it and he wanted to avoid admitting that he was sort of okay with Vulpes now.  

“I didn’t expect that I’d really need to do complex surgery on your nose.  I knew I’d need to splint it, but I had my sleeves rolled up for something else.”  He started work on my nose while he spoke and I froze, hardly daring to breathe in case I would move by accident.  Arcade realized this and stopped.  “Lay down on the couch, you won’t be still enough like this anyway.”  

I lay down and he continued to explain.  “The doctor here… he’s good, but he isn’t actually a doctor.  I think he’s an EMT or something, he has medical training, but not a full degree’s worth.  He did a good job on Vulpes, and I talked to him about that to make sure while I was back there.  He might have been a field medic, but he seems like a pacifist, so I wouldn’t expect that.  He knows how to deal with bone breaks and first aid as well as at least a few more common ailments, but he can’t handle serious disease or more complicated problems and he doesn’t have very high-tech equipment.”  I flinched, despite my best efforts and he rested a hand on the side of my jaw to hold me still.  “I _am_ going to give you some pain killers later, but I want you alert for now.  I need you to tell me if you can or can’t breathe at various points or if you feel bleeding anywhere.”  

I murmured assent and tied to be still.  It didn’t hurt too badly, really, my shoulder felt worse and it had swollen significantly before the ice had been applied.  Right now most of it was just numb, but I still felt an ache deep in the joint.  Arcade continued his story.  

“I was back there mostly to make sure Vulpes wouldn’t need a second surgery and to get what I needed for this, and this woman came in having a baby.  Apparently that happens a lot here, the clinic treats everyone in the area for free and mostly it’s injuries and births.  I don’t know if they don’t have insurance or something that they can’t go to a hospital.  The guy, his name’s Daniel, I guess he’s gotten lucky because he doesn’t really have the medical equipment or knowledge to handle complicated births, but he apparently has only lost one patient to childbirth so far.”

“Is this going where I think it’s going?”

“Probably,” he admitted, “What do you think happened?”

“I—”  I started to answer and then coughed, a cough which became the most painful sneeze I’d ever known.  One of my nostrils became slightly unblocked and I gingerly covered my face, eyes streaming.  “Fuck.  I think my nose just tried to flee my face.”

Arcade laughed.  “I recommend against sneezing.  At least that cleared out some of the blood.  The surgery will still be more complicated than I’d expected, but I guess that isn’t surprising, given your luck.”

I stayed quiet until I stopped feeling like my whole face had shattered.  When the agony finally subsided and the tears in my eyes had cleared out down the sides of my face, I opened my eyes again and asked in mild amazement.  “So you delivered a baby in the past fifteen minutes?”

He wiped the tears off my face and nodded.  “Twins, actually.  They were fine, but the mother had a severe hemorrhage during birth.  Daniel had never dealt with one before so I stepped in.  Apparently, they hadn’t actually known I was a doctor until I did that and I guess he trusted that I knew what I was doing at the time.  I didn’t ask him about Vulpes until the woman was okay.”

“Does that happen often?  I mean, do you just bring babies into the world every day at work?”

“I’m not that kind of doctor.”  He looked a bit grim, “Usually I’m treating people who are nearly dead already, or dealing with addicts.  I’m not normally in the ER and I’ve never been present for a birth since I was an intern, but I still know how to handle them.”

*      *       *

He got very quiet after that and eventually I asked why.  

“It’s just… sort of amazing.  I mean, there are two kids back there who are only alive right now thanks to you.”  

I shrugged.  “The twins would probably be alive even if I hadn’t been here, I only saved the mother.”  Calling them the twins made me think of the Garretts, the only twins I’d ever met.  At least James might have given us a chance against Lanius.  

“Still,” Jack insisted, “If I’d become a vet, I’d just be saving animals, you’re saving people’s lives on a daily basis.”

Well, when he put it like that…  

“We’ve both been saving lives lately.”  He didn’t seem to understand what I meant by that, so I added, “Thanks.”

He smiled and I’m pretty sure we would have kissed if I hadn’t been in the process of fixing his nose.  

After a great deal of medical attention, both me fixing Jack’s nose, examining his shoulder, and medicating him, and him cleaning my back (before he took painkillers), we headed upstairs.  My back had already started to mend, according to Jack, though he might well have been trying to convince me that it was improving quickly when it was really healing only as fast as I expected.  Right now, I felt like it would never improve and I knew I’d have scars there for the rest of my life.  The cut on my stomach would probably scar as well, though it at least seemed to be healing more quickly than I’d thought it would.  I’d been very worried that it would get infected but I seemed to have gotten lucky.  By the time we were both finished, it was late evening and with nothing better to do, we headed upstairs to sleep.  

Vulpes seemed like the kind of man who didn’t trust anyone enough to sleep around them but we caught a brief glimpse of him snoozing in the cot furthest from the door before the floorboards creaked and woke him up.  He sat bolt upright as soon as we arrived.  He’d kept a light on by the stairs, presumably so we’d be able to see when we came up here.  Vulpes had been sleeping on his side, facing the door, with the blankets up to his shoulders, but when he sat up, they fell to his waist.  For a horrified second, I thought he was nude, but then I realized that he was only shirtless.  Jack seemed to make the same mistake, given the way that he focused resolutely on the cot he’d selected and refused to look away from the sheets as he sat down to take off his shoes and socks.  

Seeing that it was only us, Vulpes settled back onto the bed, keeping himself propped up on his elbows.  He didn’t lower his back fast enough for me to miss the pale lattice of scars that covered it.  Eerily similar to the scars that would form on my own back.  I wanted to ask, but knew he wouldn’t answer and that would probably test our already tenuous acceptance of one another.  I went over to my cot in between theirs, took off my boots, and lay down gingerly.  

I’d be equally uncomfortable on my back and stomach— the stomach cut was much deeper, but my back was bruised— and laying on my side would have kept my shoulders in an even more agonizing position.  I stifled a curse and just lay there like an upended turtle for a few moments.  I’d taken morphine so I’d have a _chance_ of sleeping, but it still took a while for all the wounds, bruises, and aching muscles to settle into a more bearable level of pain.  I slowly lowered my arms onto my chest and pondered the pros and cons of actually taking off my uncomfortable clothes while I realized that Jack and Vulpes were both watching me.  

“Look, just because you two have the pain tolerance of Terminators…  My back’s been practically shredded, and I’m not as used to injury as either of you.”  

Vulpes looked away enigmatically and Jack seemed to accept that.  Jack was still sitting on his bed, fully clothed aside from his feet.  His shirt had soaked in so much blood that it looked Legion crimson and about as flexible as cardboard.  His loose jeans had almost as much blood on them.  

“Hey,” Jack asked as politely as he could, “would you be okay if I _didn’t_ sleep in these filthy clothes for the second night in a row?”

Vulpes agreed to that before I had a chance to speak and I couldn’t very well say no.  I didn’t want Jack trying to sleep in those when he was injured and needed to rest.  I’d almost endured the pain of taking off my own shirt to be slightly more comfortable, but with the bandages covering so much of my skin anyway, I was more comfortable without moving my shoulders that much.  And whether he meant that he’d sleep nude or just in his boxers, he was still my boyfriend, despite everything.  I couldn’t stop loving him and I couldn’t hold a grudge with him so clearly willing to risk his life to make up for what he’d done in any way possible.  It had been his loyalty to Vulpes that got him pulled into this mess anyway, and Vulpes, in all likelihood, had been forced into the Legion himself, either as a child soldier or as slave.  I didn’t expect that he would ever tell me and it made little difference.  Either way, his loyalty to the Legion hadn’t been his fault and they were both too psychologically screwed up for me to treat Jack too harshly even if I’d been able to hold off forgiving him.  What he’d done was still a deep wound, and it probably always would be, but killing Caesar, saving my life, and everything else he’d done to fight the Legion recently started to make up for that.  If we could take down Lanius with his help, I’d call it even.  

“Sure.”  

Jack undressed while I carefully maneuvered the blankets so that they covered me and I barely had to move my back.  Jack had meant that he’d sleep in his underwear, but it was still distracting.  He had on those nearly skin-tight black boxers, he must have had half a dozen pairs of them, at least.  I looked away and saw Vulpes quickly looking away from Jack when I turned his way.  Between the two of them sleeping in shorts and the way Jack had been acting since I’d stopped Boone, we would probably have had a threesome if Vulpes and I hadn’t been in so much pain.  I didn’t get hurt too often, under normal circumstances, and apparently a shattered ankle was more than Vulpes was used to.  We all knew that pain didn’t stop Jack, personally, and he was the most lightly injured among us, so my back and Vulpes’ ankle effectively cock-blocked all of us that night.  I had to admit, right now I would have been okay with Vulpes in that context, and not just because the guy, like most of the Legion, had the build of a model.  

Jack creaked the bed and, out of curiosity, I looked back towards him to see him shoving his pile of bloody clothes under the bed, presumably so they’d be more out of the way.  He bent over to do so and I could see the scar on his head even if his hair was beginning to hide it.  It was good that he’d gotten out of those clothes, at least, the fabric had left marks on his skin where it matted against him and his jeans had left a line of blisters along his waist.  When he sat back up, the jagged ridges across his chest reminded me of the bear attack and how terrified I had been at the time.  From the way he’d acted telling me about it, I trusted now that he’d been just as worried when I’d been enslaved.  I let myself accept that most of what he’d said had been the truth, if not all of it.  

*      *      *

Sleep came slowly for all of us, which was not surprising given the extent of our injuries.  I had forced myself to stay awake for much longer than usual and my fear of water had made sleep impossible on the boat.  After remaining awake for so long, once I slept (I had not fallen into a deep sleep until after Jack and Arcade were asleep as well) I remained asleep well into the day.  It unnerved me when I woke to find that both of them had already gone downstairs and the movement had not awakened me.  

I was used to stakeouts, and similar expanses of vacant time, so remaining idle for two days before we moved on Lanius was not too difficult, although being unable to walk or contact my men was a new aspect.  I had memorized their numbers, but after everything I owed Joshua I was not about to ask him for a burn phone unless it was needed, and I couldn’t risk the numbers being traced back here.  Alerio should be coordinating our efforts, I’d ordered him to do so if he lost contact with me, which he had.  He would likely frequent Jack’s house where I’d been storing frumentari weapons and supplies, so it was probable that we would meet him when we went there to resupply.  

Arcade and Jack were much less tolerant of boredom and inactivity.  They seemed to have made up, which was certainly an improvement to Arcade hating Jack and Jack moping around and trying desperately to appease the doctor.  They did at least minimize any displays of affection while I was around but as we all had very little space in which to occupy ourselves, I inevitably felt a bit annoyed.  They were hardly clinging to each other, it was mostly more subtle gestures.  Inflections.  The way Jack laughed and smiled.  The way they looked at each other.  I would probably have found it insignificant if it hadn’t involved Jack, but at least he was happy.  

After an exceedingly dull morning during which we all crowded around the portable television and watched one of those talk shows old people watched like a morning ritual.  There was nothing more interesting to watch right now.  

One morning talk show was all Arcade could stand.  Jack actually dozed off during it, slumping over onto Arcade until the doctor moved and woke him up.  Arcade turned to me.  

“Do you play bridge?”

Jack went from sleepy to hyped in an instant and raptly waited for my answer.  

“I understand the game, I have never actually _played_ before…”

“I’m going to see if anyone around here has a deck of cards.”

For the rest of the day, we played cards.  Nearly all of that time was bridge, although we switched to blackjack and then to poker towards the end of the day.  Arcade convinced Follows-Chalk to be our fourth player and endeavored to teach the naive but eager local the rules.  Despite having thought that the Legion only numbered a few hundred men, he proved to be an excellent strategist and won nearly every hand he played, as did I.  Despite their greater familiarity with the rules, and their general aptitude, Jack and Arcade had consistently terrible hands.  After the first two games, we swapped partners and Jack and I proved a more even match to Arcade and Follow-Chalk with luck having become a bit more even.  We stopped playing Blackjack after Jack was dealt twenty-one seven times in ten hands.  I was dealer and the only one unsurprised by the result, which left them thinking that I’d stacked the deck until I let Arcade deal another ten hands, of which Jack was dealt twenty-one on nine of them.  We quickly switched to poker.  Whether Jack had good or bad hands was irrelevant because he often forgot the value of his cards and generally bet whatever he felt like at the time.  More than once I realized that he’d intentionally lost a hand for no apparent reason and everyone else figured out his utter lack of strategy when he folded with a full house against a pair of threes that Follows-Chalk hadn’t even bluffed well.  This absolutely baffled the local, though Jack was enjoying himself, either because he just liked seeing what he was dealt or because he enjoyed messing with us.  It certainly was amusing to watch and Arcade seemed to feel that way as well.  On the second to last hand, Jack became unexpectedly serious and bluffed wildly, which none of us saw through until it was too late.  I did suspect that he might have been bluffing, as he did bluff sometimes, and often on very low hands, but more often, when he felt like winning a hand, he placed ludicrously large bets or went all in when he knew he had the best hand at the table.  Of course, he rarely knew for certain, but typically when he bet so forcefully, he revealed a straight or a straight flush at the end of the hand.  I expected no less this time and I was the last to back out.  Jack had laid down a hand with a pair of twos.  I’d had a flush in spades, ace high.  Although the game had fluctuated wildly, by that point Jack’s previous hand had evened things out, for the most part.  I had been winning for a long time, although we weren’t playing for money.  I’d nearly won five times already and I’d had forty-two chips when Jack bluffed me into folding.  Jack had more than doubled his thirteen chips in that hand, leaving us both at twenty-eight.  Arcade was also at twenty-eight.  He’d been dealt awful hands almost every time, and was, at least in this game, the most cautious better I had ever seen.  He’d almost lost completely at least ten times but had managed to quadruple his chips on a high straight, the only good hand he’d gotten in any game all night.  He hadn’t been able to hide a hint of surprise when he’d picked the cards up, but I’d had nothing that hand, so I could hardly compete.  After that, he’d bet so carefully that he’d stayed almost constant since then.  Follows-Chalk had been playing well, but after several recent losses, he was down to sixteen chips.  We were all tired by this point, so we wanted the game to end this hand, and had mentioned that we’d rather not stop before it was actually won, so I wasn’t surprised when Arcade went all in before he picked up his hand, clearly expecting to lose.  He couldn’t hide a flash of surprise when he picked up his cards and I noted that, although no one else seemed to notice and I didn’t expect that I could compete with him as he hadn’t shown such visible reaction to the only decent hand he’d gotten all day.  But I’d already gone all in.  Jack didn’t fold, and so he matched the bet, also going all in.  As usual, his smile revealed nothing about his hand and it was entirely possible that he didn’t even remember whether or not his hand was good.  Follows-Chalk, looking unusually confident this hand, went all in as well.  

We lay our cards down.  We went in order around the table, Follows-Chalk had a straight, ten high, beating my three eights.  Jack beat Follows-Chalk, almost playfully laying down a straight flush in hearts, seven high.  After his luck all day, none of us were too surprised.  Arcade almost looked amazed but it was more at the fact that he had actually won.  Only his luck surprised me when, after being dealt terrible cards almost the entire day, he laid down a royal flush, also in hearts, on that last hand.  

Cards had put us all in a good mood, even if we were still in pain.  They must have cleaned and changed the bandages on their wounds because I was the first upstairs, despite my leg.  I couldn’t have slept with the light on even if I had wanted to, so I got comfortable and lay on my cot to wait.  I’d had something nagging at my mind for months now and although I had planned not to say it, no longer being in a relationship with Jack and heading to face Lanius tomorrow, I felt that it was something I needed to say.  If nothing else, it could give Jack and Arcade a chance to bond over something, even if that something was a potential dislike of myself.  

*       *       *

Arcade and I shared a laugh about the card game.  Really, I was glad he’d finally won, his luck in general seemed even worse than mine, just in less spectacular ways.  I kissed him in the stairwell so we wouldn’t bother Vulpes, even though I couldn’t be sure whether we annoyed him or he was just bothered by his leg.  I wanted to be polite.  

Getting into bed went much as it had yesterday, although Daniel had procured some clean clothes for all of us.  They were all jeans and t-shirts, though, so the pants at least weren’t comfortable to sleep in and although the room was a comfortable temperature, I’d rather keep the shirt as clean as possible if I’d be wearing it tomorrow as well.  Vulpes had already stripped down to his shorts, presumably, as he was under the blankets up to his chest, lying on his back with his hands folded in a contemplative way.  I figured he was thinking about the fight with Lanius tomorrow and didn’t interrupt him.  Arcade cringed as his back settled onto the bed the way he had last night and once again, he didn’t bother taking anything off.  I didn’t blame him.  I hadn’t taken anything for pain today and I took great lengths to move my shoulder as little as possible.  I couldn’t imagine how much it would hurt to have my entire back as badly torn up as his.  

Vulpes didn’t say anything until I was undressed and about to fall asleep.  Still awake between us, Arcade had that slight frown of somebody trying to fall asleep but unable to due to pain and that visage of annoyance didn’t change when Vulpes spoke, although he reopened his eyes.  

“Jack?”

I stretched gingerly and rolled onto my stomach.  “Yeah?”

“I was the last person to see your mother alive.”

Arcade tried to sit up and stare at him, but grimaced at the pain and settled for a sideways scowl.  I propped myself up on one elbow and froze.  “….what?”  That had come completely out of nowhere.  

“I was on your mother’s plane when she left Seoul.”

I stared and Arcade murmured, “I really hope you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”  

Vulpes sighed softly.  “I thought it would be best if you knew, Jack.  I did not kill your mother directly, and I convinced her to call you before she died, but I was aware that the Legion would no doubt make an attempt on her life after she had refused our request that she support us.”

*      *       *

Jack looked baffled.  “Why?  Why did the Legion want my mom helping them, I mean there are other people with that much money and the Legion never seemed that into engines…”

Vulpes and I started answering simultaneously and he fell silent to let me continue.  “Jack, Poseidon Energy also made incredibly high-tech weapons for the United States government.”

Vulpes clarified something I hadn’t known that hardly surprised me.  “Poseidon supplied weapons to most major governments.  The Legion sought those as well as funding.  It was hoped that your mother’s successor would be more willing, but instead it seems that after the assassination of both your mother and her predecessor, the current C.E.O. has raised security to the point that we have not yet been able to reach him with the offer.  Had.  Ultimately it is to our advantage that the Legion do not have these weapons or they would be a much greater threat.”  He’d slipped up, but at least he was trying to assure us that he had turned against the Legion.  He probably couldn’t be faking that at this point, but I wasn’t positive, not after he’d just admitted having basically killed Jack’s mother while the two of them had been involved.  I mean, the guy was clearly not the most moral person, but killing the mother of his partner just seemed like a new level of cruelty even if he hadn’t done it himself.  

“I suspected that a bomb had been planted on her jet, but did not seek it out.”

Vulpes hardly showed any reaction to his words, he avoided eye contact and stared resolutely at the ceiling.  I looked over at Jack and found him lying on his stomach with his arms folded beneath his pillow.  The lower half of his face was hidden in the feather-filled white fabric, but his eyes stared almost blankly towards Vulpes.  After a very long silence, he asked softly, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you should know.  I have wanted to tell you for a long time, however as we may well die fighting Lanius, this seemed like the most appropriate time.”

Jack fell silent and stayed silent.  He didn’t cry, though he teared up and spent a long time staring at his pillow.  I felt like I should do something to comfort him, even though there was nothing I could say that would help and I could barely reach him.  I stretched my arm out and rested my hand on his elbow— I was on his right side, and with his arms under his pillow it was that or his injured shoulder.  He snaked one hand out to clasp my own but just kept staring blankly.  

No one said anything more and at some point I realized that he’d fallen asleep and let myself do the same. 


	51. To End the Rapture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The final preparations for the confrontation fall into place.

Somehow, eventually, we all fell asleep that night.  I don’t know when Vulpes slept, but I know that I woke early in the morning to the realization that Jack, clinging to my forearm like that cliche branch on the edge of a cliff, had fallen out of bed, as usual.  He hadn’t woken up, now he was just asleep with his legs still in his own bed and his torso half against and half underneath my bed.  He lay on his back.  Looking to my other side, I realized that Vulpes was also fast asleep.  Between my back and the awkward angle of my arm, however, I was wide awake.  I extricated myself from Jack, who sleepily clawed the edge of my blanket into his grasp to replace my wrist.  If I’d physically been able to drag him back onto his bed, I might have, but I didn’t want to risk straining my back and if I’d tried, I would have probably woken him up anyway.  

They came downstairs while I was finishing breakfast and we shared the couch again.  Joshua was nowhere to be found or I’d have asked when he planned to leave, but as it was all three of us just seemed to be prepared to leave whenever he arrived.  

It was good that we had.  Joshua returned from whatever he’d been doing at six in the morning to walk in and ask if we were ready to leave.  He was clearly planning to leave immediately and we did so, although Jack was as groggy as I’d expected this early in the morning.  He and I had not spoken to Vulpes since last night and the frumentari seemed unsurprised by this.  It pissed me off what he’d done, although at least he’d told Jack.   I was actively angry with him and didn’t hide it while Jack just had such a general aura of melancholy this morning that Vulpes intentionally left him alone.  Between his mood and his sleepiness, he hardly said a word all morning, to anyone.  

For a lot of reasons, including what Vulpes had admitted yesterday, the frumentari sat beside Graham in the front seat during one of the most uncomfortable rides of my life.  Joshua drove an SUV about as battered as my old car had been.  It ran fine, but the shocks were horrible and the upholstery had sort of died to the point that we felt like we were sitting on metal.  Vulpes and Graham hardly said anything; they briefly discussed Lanius’ likely activities and then shut up for the rest of the ride.  Vulpes seemed lost in thought and Graham drove like he’d been given a mission from god, which might well have been what he thought.  For the entire trip he kept his car radio tuned to a religious talk show, apparently a Mormon one, and as much as I didn’t mind the talk of Jesus and all that, it was more than a little frustrating when the host started ranting about homosexuals.  Graham maintained his resolute stare, not even glancing at any of us, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t mean it as an attack.  He _was_ helping us kill Lanius, after all.  Jack continued to stay silent even after day had fully dawned and he’d woken up completely.  He stared out the window as he always did, and through the eight hours of traffic he often shook uncontrollably.  I’m sure it didn’t help that we were almost always near at least one tractor trailer.  

Defying the radio host’s ranting, I wrapped my arm around Jack, avoiding his right shoulder and as a result resting my palm against his bicep.  He snuggled against me.  

“Are you okay?”  I spoke very softly, both because I suspected that Jack wouldn’t want this being a public conversation, at least not if he was going to be honest, and because I’d rather not risk pissing off Graham if he wasn’t happy to be helping a bunch of gay men.  

“I’ll be fine.”  

For once, he sounded like he meant it.  He turned to look out the window on my side of the car, leaning against me a bit more closely and watching the traffic while he anxiously rotated one of his rings around his finger.  It was a nervous tic, just like Garrett’s thing with his watch.  Eventually, as I kept my arm around Jack, I felt him stop shaking.  He didn’t relax completely, even as the ride went on, but I couldn’t be sure if he was nervous because we were driving or if his thoughts focused on our fateful destination.  He kept twisting his rings the entire ride, switching which one he was turning every few minutes.  Jack didn’t say anything more, but by the time we were driving into the city, anxiety had become a sort of focused tension.  He frowned slightly, “Where exactly are we headed here?”

Graham had apparently had a destination in mind and I’d trusted him and Vulpes enough in this capacity not to question them.  The guys did this sort of thing for a living; I figured they knew what they were doing.  I hadn’t really considered where we were going and they hadn’t told us.  Mostly, I’d assumed we were headed to the courthouse right away, or else we were going to some secret Legion stockpile for weapons.  

I guess, after how regularly he’d been there and with Jack being Jack, I wasn’t too surprised when Vulpes replied, “We’re going to your house, that’s where I’ve been storing most of the frumentari munitions for this city.”

Jack frowned and then realized how much sense it made.  He nodded.  “Oh.  Okay.”  

Vulpes turned in his seat to frown at Jack curiously, picking up on a tone I hadn’t noticed.  “Is there some reason that we should avoid your house?”

Jack shook his head.  “No, I just had most of my stuff shipped to Scotland a few days ago.”

Aside from Graham, who continued to stare at the road as if he couldn’t even hear us, the rest of the car stared at Jack with varying degrees of shock.  

He explained.  “I had it arranged as a contingency, if I didn’t contact them by noon on the day I went to rescue you.  If I didn’t get back to them, either I was dead or I figured we’d be in trouble, one way or another.  If I was dead, shipping everything back home would mean less legal trouble, and it would be more convenient.  If we survived, either the Legion would be trying to hunt us down, the cops might have found out about at least _my_ involvement, or for one reason or another we’d be wanted by the police, so it seemed like a good precaution.  They don’t know about the painting in the bathroom and probably can’t get it off the wall anyway, so any supplies should be fine.”  

His forethought amazed me more than anything else.  “You sent everything to Scotland?  This from the guy who usually doesn’t plan even a _day_ in advance?”

Jack grinned and nodded.  “Well, I thought it was better to make sure it would all be safe, lest I get extradited or something drastic.”

Now I stared for a different reason.  I hadn’t considered the real consequences of this if we ended up becoming known to have a connection to the Legion.  At the very least, they’d want to question us and that might bring my past to light.  If by some miracle we made it through this without fatal injuries, we probably _would_ need to flee the country, and I guess Scotland was as good as anywhere else.  Although it would take a lot to get used to the idea of living in Jack’s sprawling castle on a remote island where half the people had accents thicker than a tule fog.  I happened to wonder if my stuff had gone with his.  

Nodding in approval of Jack’s logic, Vulpes added, “So this is a continuation of the precautions you took in moving your wealth to Swiss bank accounts.  A wise move.”  

Jack started to thank him but shut up suddenly when Joshua stopped at a red light near the top of a very long and steep road.  He sat so stiffly that I could feel the muscles of his back quivering against my arm.  He didn’t relax at all until we finished cresting the hill, traveling down the other, equally steep side, and cruising through a quick series of side streets to stop in the parking lot at the foot of the stairs.  

Jack scrambled out the door as soon as Joshua turned off the engine, unlocking the door himself before Graham had a chance to do so.  The burned man cast him a sidelong frown, looking towards Vulpes in the process.  

“He dislikes cars.”

Graham nodded, “Ah.  An understandable fear.”  Vulpes accepted that response without vocal protest while Joshua took the keys from the ignition and got out, but he frowned.  He hadn’t been driving _badly_.  

Jack had his house keys out before the rest of us had left the car and he stood by the stairs, twiddling his key ring and waiting.  I couldn’t be sure if he just wanted to get the battle over with or if he was eager to be in his house, probably for the last time.  I followed him and Vulpes and Graham, the latter pacing the former, presumably in case Vulpes needed help up the stairs (he’d refused to take his crutches out of the SUV, although he had brought them.)  I was certainly not going to argue with him about letting the bones heal, not so recently after what he’d admitted last night and not knowing how stubborn he could be.  I caught up with Jack and walked beside him to his house.  He stopped playing with his rings to clasp my hand as we walked.  

As much as most houses on the stairs stuck to gardens and minimized seasonal decorations, I saw lights and plastic icicles, and even a few of those little motorized light-deer in the yards we passed.  In the early afternoon, they weren’t lit, but they reminded me of the season.  Was it even still December?  How had so little time passed when so much had happened?  It felt like it had been years since I’d lived here.  Aside from a few more lights, nothing had changed.  

*      *      *

I knew I’d miss living here.  It was beautiful, and I’d never forget the heady scents of the gardens, especially the jasmine, under the white tower.  I loved it here.  These past few months had been the best vacation I’d ever taken, and maybe I could have learned to truly live here, but however long I’d been away, my home remained the Highlands.  Caledonia, and not just the fantasy, but the reality, was where I belonged.  And if we were all wanted men, I could only hope that Arcade would join me.  If he wanted to go somewhere else and if he’d have me, I’d follow him anywhere, of course, but I’d much rather return to the island I knew and loved.  Besides, it would probably be better for him to live somewhere that remote, given his family’s background.  

It hadn’t occurred to me what might happen strolling along the stairs after I’d told everyone that Arcade was dead and then I’d also vanished, and I didn’t even consider what they might have thought until, pondering our next home while I walked beside Arcade, I suddenly heard running feet on the brick and a gasped cry, “Arcade!  Israel!  Gannon!”  

Daisy hit Arcade like my pack of dogs and would have knocked him over completely if I hadn’t been standing beside him.  She tackled him from behind in a hug that must have been agonizing.  For an old woman, she was damn spry, and strong, judging from how tightly she seemed to be hugging him.  By some miracle he kept his glasses on, but his knees buckled when she hit him and between that and the force of her hug, Arcade fell onto me.  I, in turn, fell against the fence of the yard behind me.  I stayed standing and Arcade regained his footing a bit, but we were stuck, more or less pinned against the fence.  I was surprised that he’d only stumbled, with how tightly Daisy was hugging him and how hard she’d hit his back, I was surprised he hadn’t fainted.  As it was, he’d made a garbled sound of intense pain and she either hadn’t heard him or had ignored it.  His eyes were streaming and he wore an expression that was mostly grimace and partly smile.  

“Daisy!  What—?”  That was all he got out before a stampede of dogs and people rushed down the stairs and engulfed us.  In a storm of fur and bodies, I was vaguely aware of canine tongues and noses probing my shoes, socks, and jeans.  At least eight dogs barked and whined excitedly and about as many people hugged and shouted with similar sentiment.  I felt a hand slip between my fingers and take my keys while I was still struggling to make sense of all the words and questions.  

Arms wrapped us both and in the storm of people, I couldn’t tell who the hugs were meant for; most of them seemed to engulf at least one person the hugger hadn’t intended to hug.  I couldn’t sort out anything but wild sound from the storm of speech around us and even whole words were a rarity.  Arcade, visibly in pain, but equally disoriented, just stared at me blankly while I stared back, dazed and uncomfortable in the crowd.  Amid the chaos, neither of us could make any sense of anything but each other and either because of that fact or because I was just so trapped and confused and awkward that my expression looked hilarious, Arcade smiled at me and chuckled.  He was still in pain, his eyes were still watering and his laugh stuck in his throat involuntarily, but he was happy, and because of that, I was too.  

Much to both of our relief, one voice cut in through the crowd.  “Alright, alright, if you don’t step back you’re gonna smother them.”

Somebody took the opportunity to grope my ass as the crowd spread out a bit and I looked over my shoulder, unsurprised to see Cass beside me.  She laughed.  “Hey, it’d be a shame if I never got to do _that_ again.”

Arcade answered her before I could come up with something witty.  “I’m not sure I agree with that.”  He put an arm around me, avoiding my sore shoulder and stepped to stand beside me— probably so his back was mostly out of harms way.  Cass didn’t know him well enough to know he meant it gently enough, so he added.  “I’m glad you’re okay, at least.  Just, please, stop groping my boyfriend.”

Daisy spoke up.  “What the hell do you mean you’re glad _she’s_ okay?  _Where have you been?!_   _Why haven’t you called?!_ ”  She turned her glare to me.  “You!  _Why the hell did you say he was dead?!_ ”

Now that I wasn’t looking through a storm of arms and bodies, I could pick out who was here.  Raul had broken up the hug fest, he and Gibson stood a little back from the main crowd surrounded by not only Gibson’s pack of dogs, but also Rex and Turing who strained at their leashes even harder than their fellows.  Vero stood beside me and Cass, a little to the front of her friend.  Daisy stood across from us with the rest of Arcade’s family behind her, as separated from the rest of the group as the narrow stairs would allow.  The rest of Arcade’s family, to both our surprise, included not only Johnson and Judah, but Moreno, Doc Henry, and even Calamity, who hadn’t joined in the hug and just stood towards the back of the group, smoking like a chimney.  

Arcade didn’t process what she’d asked right away, he just stared at all of them and tilted his head.  “You’re _all_ here?”

“After all Prosper did, we wouldn’t risk getting together for your funeral?”  It was Johnson who explained and he added while Arcade looked a bit more startled, “Hopefully it was very preemptive, are you okay?”

Daisy shifted her attention back to Arcade like a mother wolf, “Are you hurt?  What happened?”

Arcade took off his glasses for a moment to dry his eyes, they’d stopped watering now, although the scabs on his back had probably opened up again.  “It’s a long story.  I’ll…  I’m okay.”

Daisy started to round on me again and he stopped her.  “Daisy.  Jack…Jack saved my life.  This isn’t his fault.”

*      *      *

Daisy looked dubious, and Jack added honestly, “He was…  I thought he was dead, or going to be.  I only told you he was dead because I thought he would be, I tried to get him out, recklessly, and somehow it worked.  Really, I’m sorry.”

Vero and Johnson frowned, “`Get him out?’”  I’m pretty sure they had different suspicions.  I wasn’t sure how to answer and Jack decided to save me the trouble.  

“It’s a really long story, he got captured and—”

“Captured?”  Daisy was in full soldier-mode now, “Why?  By whom?”

I waved as if it wasn’t relevant.  “Daisy, it doesn’t matter now.”

Vero seized the opportunity to speak, “Were the Garretts captured as well?  Are they alright?”

Jack shook his head, “They’re dead.”  He looked at me, “They’re _both_ dead, right?”

I nodded.  “Yes.  James might’ve…he helped us out a lot.”

Vero sighed.  “Aww.  I’d really been hoping they were alright, Manny got killed while you were gone.  He set up a trap and sniped a bunch of legionaries.  Boone’s been gone for a while and Manny thought the Legion got him.”

“Well, that’s partly true…”

Jack hastily added, “He’s alive, but he was a slave for a while.”

Daisy finally got another chance to speak.  She was having none of my excuses.  “Doesn’t matter?  You were nearly killed and you fell off the face of the Earth for weeks, where the hell were you?  Was this the Legion’s doing?  When I get my hands on those—”

“Daisy, let it go.”

She started to fly into a rant but Jack shut everyone up with a very simple and urgent excuse, “We don’t have time to explain everything right now, we need to get stuff from the arsenal in my basement and then stop the Legion.”

The resounding “what” could probably have been heard on the other side of the hill.  The crowd all started asking questions at once and Jack held up his hands.  

“Sorry, but we really don’t have time to explain.—”

“Where is the Legion right now?”  

Johnson had that look I’d seen way too often.  He was going to help, come hell or high water.  The other remnants had the same set stare, even Calamity, and looking around, so did the rest of the group.  Even the dogs had stopped barking and watched us in focused silence.  

Not certain what plan Joshua and Vulpes had, if any, I looked around for them.  Vulpes had disappeared entirely while I quickly found Joshua leaving Jack’s house, wearing a bulletproof vest and openly carrying seven rifles and a box of pistols, grenades, and ammo.  He was walking back to the car as if he was just hauling groceries.  

The entire group followed my gaze.  

Joshua paused on the stairs, looking them over with an appraising eye.  “Ask, and the Lord will provide…”  It wasn’t clear if Joshua meant willing soldiers or munitions.  As one, the group around us glanced back to me and Jack, frowned, and returned their gaze to Joshua.  The burned man stepped forward to explain the situation to them.  Jack and I continued up to the house.  

It had really been cleared out.  

Stepping through the door, the paintings and furniture had vanished.  Jack followed me as I checked every room and closet.  I didn’t expect that the movers would even know what was mine and not his, nor was I looking for anything, but it was disorienting to see the house stripped clean and while we were here anyway, I wanted to see if Jack had left _anything_ here or just shipped it all overseas.  Besides, it would take a while for Graham to explain the battle plans.  

The house was empty.  Room after room, we saw only the minimally-lit walls and bare floors.  Going upstairs, we found the only item of Jack’s left in the house, his very old and battered backpack.  Knowing what I knew now, I suspected that Jack had taken that backpack with him the night he’d been kicked out of his house and had it through the subsequent time he’d spent homeless.  It might even have gone into the Thames with him when he’d met his ex.  The faded and stained black canvas bulged around light cargo, probably clothes.  Jack picked up one heavily patched black leather strap and slung it over his good shoulder.  

“I had that lockbox you had under the bed shipped packed in padding and handled extra carefully.”  

I breathed a mental sigh of relief.  “Thank you.”

He raised an eyebrow.  “Do you mind if I ask…?”

I shook my head.  “I’ll show you later.  We don’t have time to talk about it right now.”

“No we don’t.”  Vulpes managed to look at-ease, hobbling in with as little weight as possible on his bad ankle.  He carried another three rifles, seven pistols and a box that had been very hastily attached to a strap for easy carrying.  Unlike Joshua’s box of munitions, this box held in equal parts ammunition, grenades, and a wide assortment of seemingly random objects topped off by a clearly very old stuffed toy fox.  Jack beamed as soon as he saw this.  

“Funny.  I never pegged you as the beanie-baby type.”

I expected a glare, but to my great surprise, Vulpes quickly explained, “I was very different as a child.  I believe that I’ve become a little more like that again recently.”  He smiled at Jack, a little more widely than his typical almost-neutral smile.

Jack smiled back, a little bittersweet.  “I’m glad.”

Vulpes looked back at me and became more focused.  “Alerio has already taken the rest of the munitions.  We did not need more than these, and will probably not use all of them.  But the fact that he took the rest suggests that the frumentari are still fighting; we will likely have their aid in this battle.”

“Good to hear.”  I couldn’t believe I was actually glad to heard that.  We were really desperate when I was glad to have anyone we could find on our side.  If No-Bark showed up wanting to help with his pocket-knife, I would have been glad to have him.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the Avenged Sevenfold song.   
> Also, do you all want to know what's in the box because I'm not sure if I'm going to have him say what's there?


	52. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trio fight Lanius.

The crowd had dispersed by the time we left the house and Graham was waiting in the car.  Vulpes had summarized the plan, leaving a lot of questions about what Graham would be doing.  He’d said the burned man planned a “distraction” that would get us inside if the Legion was already there and recommended that whether or not we arrived before them, we must wait until they had taken the building.  Vulpes had no contact with his men, but Graham had apparently intercepted Legion orders calling men from L.A. to assist the severely weakened San Francisco branch.  We didn’t know whether Lanius planned to simply destroy the courthouse or not, but Vulpes and Graham both suspected that he aimed to hold the courthouse and lure the city police, and perhaps even state police and national guard into the fortified location.  They’d lose men taking the building and Vulpes and Graham, understandably, aimed to attack after the Legion had been weakened but before they’d set up defenses.  

Graham had conveyed the plans to all our friends and family who’d crowded around us on the stairs.  In the car, he explained that they had all listened, though several of them seemed more likely to devise their own tactics.  I realized from the distaste in his tone that the man was very used to commanding an army.  How and why had the Legion been so terrified of him?  I’d probably never know.  

Surprisingly, Jack became even more nervous in the car as we drove to the courthouse, though that might well have been due to the boxes of explosives sitting behind us.  Joshua, to his credit, drove even more carefully and we survived intact until we stopped on the second level of a parking garage.  Once again, Jack leapt out as soon as we’d stopped.  

*      *      *

I still hated riding in cars.  Once we were back on my island, that was one thing I’d really be glad to avoid.  Graham had said we needed to get everything out of the car, though he wouldn’t clearly explain why.  He just said he needed the car for something and left Arcade and I curious.  I didn’t particularly like the thought of leaving my backpack alone in the garage so while I was waiting for them to open the hatchback, I scanned the area for any good hiding spots.  And noticed that we weren’t as alone as we’d thought.  

Joshua had parked in an isolated garage on an empty floor, in an area that seemed completely deserted at five in the evening on a Sunday.  The sun had started to set over the sea and the concrete walls cast solid shadows, easily concealing many things, including the two men sitting against the wall opposite us.  The angle of the sun and lack of close lighting rendered them almost completely invisible and neither moved or made a sound.  They also sat against the wall in the row furthest away from us, meaning we had around sixty meters between us.  They were partly hidden by another low wall.  I was lucky enough that when I left the SUV, I happened to look their way at the same time that one of the men shifted his grip on a rifle and I saw both the movement and the metallic gleam.  

“Guys.”  

Arcade, Graham, and Vulpes all looked at me and I nodded towards the men across the way.  They followed my gaze, frowned, and turned back to me.  

Arcade spoke first, “What is it?”

I could feel the two men watching us now, but I guess they weren’t sure if they’d really been seen or not.  They both stayed perfectly still like sighted rabbits.  

“There’s two guys sitting against that wall over there.”  I pointed.  “Snipers, I’d guess.  I saw a rifle.”

Arcade put his hand on his pistol and Graham and Vulpes both drew assault rifles from the trunk.  Vulpes limped casually towards the wall between us and them and called out when he was near it, “Who goes there?”

Arcade muttered something about having watched too many movies set in the Middle Ages and nudged me behind a concrete pillar.  I’d been about to grab a gun as well, but he gave me a very pointed stare.  

It turns out, I didn’t need one.  Hearing Vulpes’ very distinct voice, both men stood and walked towards us.  One of them slung his gun over his back and the other just lowered his own rifle.  Once they got close enough, I recognized them and so did Graham and Vulpes.  

*      *      *

Oh, god, it was the guy who’d killed the governor.  From the sketch, I’d placed him in his late twenties but in person he looked younger, probably early twenties, but he might have been a teenager.  And the man with him, presumably another frumentari, looked even younger, probably seventeen.  They were fucking _kids_.  The Legion had _kids_ killing politicians and planting bombs.  _Vulpes_ had _kids_ helping us.  

The younger teenager beamed, seeing Vulpes and struggled to regain his composure, clearly trying to mimic Vulpes’ own facade of emotionlessness.  “Sir!”  His voice broke and he cleared his throat before continuing, “Sir, you’re alive!”  The kid was clearly resisting the urge to hug Vulpes and I got the impression that he either saw him as a mentor or an older brother.  

Vulpes answered with hardly any of his usual stoic monotone, “I’m glad to see both of you alive.  I take it that you’ve been following the orders I gave you before, Alerio?”

Alerio nodded, regaining the ability to act calm and uncaring.  “We distracted Lanius at the docks.  The C-4 destroyed much of the Legion barracks and its armies.  Picus and I evaded Lanius there and I hope we held his attention long enough for your purposes.  Picus has been trying to alert the police to Lanius’ plans, but has not been able to stay in contact.  We chose this garage to snipe as many Legion officers as possible.  We will try to hit Lanius, but we might not have a chance or be able to penetrate his armor.”  

Vulpes agreed.  “Lanius will probably expect and prepare for snipers, you would be more helpful aiming for his centurions.”  

Graham stepped forward and the frumentari finally noticed him.  

They clearly knew who he was.  “T-the Malpais Legate!”

Vulpes gave Alerio a frown and explained, “Joshua Graham will be helping us to eliminate Lanius.  Have you heard anything regarding the Legate’s injuries?”

Alerio shook his head.  “Lanius has been injured?”

Vulpes seemed about to explain but Graham cut him off.  “Did you drive here?”

Cato (his name really made me want to hate him) hesitated but Alerio answered openly.  “We have two sedans parked two levels above us.  One is stolen.”  

“My vehicle may not survive our attack.” Graham explained, eliciting long, puzzled stares from both myself and Jack.  Graham continued, “It would probably be wise to have our cargo stored in a different car so we can leave after Lanius is dead.”  

Openly proclaiming that we would not only kill Lanius, but leave afterwards seemed incredibly bold of Joshua.  I mean, I wasn’t really expecting this to end well, even with a lot of help, Lanius had many men and the four, or even six of us didn’t seem like the kind of strike team able to take out an army.  I was pretty much banking on the idea that Lanius might be crippled by infection right now but my morals wouldn’t let me just leave and hope he died.  

It didn’t help that Jack had no idea how to safely handle a gun, in the literal not euphemistic sense.  Right now I’d gotten used to the pain of my back just enough that Jack’s too-tight t-shirt and jeans started to distract me again.  

Alerio seemed as surprised by Graham’s confidence as I was, but he agreed and the four ex-legionaries moved the supplies they couldn’t carry on their person into the cars.  Vulpes took his crutches and the box he’d taken from Jack’s house and put them in one of the cars while Joshua stored the munitions he couldn’t carry and a handful of things from his SUV in the car where Cato and Alerio had moved all their stuff.  Apparently, this was Alerio’s vehicle.  Both of them had been living out of cars for the past several days, at least, and Cato had planned to ditch his stolen Nissan in the garage but Graham and Vulpes had a better idea.  

Vulpes took Jack’s backpack up to the cars when Jack suggested that I take the time to give him a crash course in shooting so he’d at least have something better than a knife and his, admittedly amazing, legs.  I didn’t have anything to drop off in the cars myself.  

Whatever his lack of knowledge, Jack caught on incredibly fast.  Without the time to really train his muscles, I picked out one of the smallest pistols before Vulpes took the last of them up to the cars and gave Jack all the ammo we had for it.  The minimal recoil was only half the reason I chose it; with me using a .50 and Graham and Vulpes toting .45s and all three of us carrying .357s, nobody else needed the caliber of this pistol, so Jack could carry all the magazines we had for it, and given the ingenuity he’d already showed in storing items on his person, I wasn’t surprised that he easily found a way to practically armor himself with bullets.  Given that he’d only ever shot a gun once and I didn’t even know if he’d hit, I wanted him to have as much ammo as possible because he’d probably end up wasting a lot of it.  I was afraid that he’d fire a test shot when I was telling him how to aim and hold the gun and Jack laughed.  

“No way, I know better than that, between your shot on the container ship and when I fired your gun earlier.  We’d deafen everyone around.”

“Good.”  I was glad that at least he wouldn’t make that mistake.  I did that more often than I’d like to admit, not because I didn’t think of it, but because I had a bad tendency to get stuck where I had to shoot in small, usually metal or concrete areas.  I was lucky my hearing remained as good as it was.  

Vulpes came back down shortly after I had Jack armed and as knowledgable about the pistol as possible given the time we had.  

“Both cars are ready to leave as soon as needed,” he explained before showing us a set of keys with the remains of a ripped off keychain.  “I have the keys to the stolen car, which holds our belongings.  Graham will return to L.A. with Cato and Alerio when Lanius is dead and we will travel together for a short while longer.”  He nodded towards Jack.  “You were right, it is very likely that we will all need to leave this country for one reason or another.  I cannot drive, so I’d appreciate if you would let me ride with you to the airport.  I booked a flight for myself to Mexico City and, if you would like, I can book flights for both of you to Scotland.”

I really hadn’t considered that.  It wasn’t even likely that we’d survive the next few hours and the idea of anything after that felt like a dream.  Hell, just the reality that I wasn’t still stuck as Caesar’s pet felt like a miracle.  Planning a move on top of it, probably to Scotland, was a new level of unexpected.  

Jack turned towards me when I didn’t answer.  “We really can’t stay here after this, one way or another they’ll find out _something_ , and even if the police don’t, there will probably be Legion stragglers to worry about.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, running a hand through my hair.  It was safe to say that enough had happened to me recently that anyone would have been more than a little overwhelmed in my position.  “Yeah, sure.  I’ll drive you.”  I glanced at Jack.  “You haven’t already booked us flights yourself, have you?”

He shook his head and laughed.  “When have you known me to be that prepared?  I haven’t.”

Vulpes and I both eyed him skeptically, but neither of us actually pointed out how uncharacteristically prudent he’d been lately.  I nodded towards Vulpes once we were over our amusement and he took out a phone.  Either he’d gotten a new one somehow, or, much more likely, he was borrowing Alerio’s.  He explained what he was doing as he did it.  “I’m booking you seats on the same plane to Mexico City as that should get us out of the country before we can be stopped.  From there, you will have ample layover time for a meal before the next flight which will take you to…”  He paused, browsing flights.  “Madrid doesn’t have any flights at the right times, so you’ll have to go through Paris.”

And he said that like it was a bad thing?  Jack made a face.  “I know the airport well enough, but if you’re booking a flight from there to London, it would probably be best to make sure there’s at least two hours between them.”  He must have noticed my puzzled frown because he explained, “The Paris airport is god awful.  The place is like a maze, and crowded, and it’s almost as bad as Chicago for delays.”

“Statistically,” Vulpes corrected, “Paris is one of the best in Europe for delays, but there’s a lot of bad weather to compete with.”  He switched into a thick Russian accent, presumably the accent he would have if he was around people speaking his native language more often, and added, “There are lots of reasons to avoid Russia in the winter.  Or anytime, really.”  

Jack frowned.  “You don’t like Russia?”

“I can tolerate the climate of Siberia, but I appreciate when I don’t have to.”  Vulpes lost his accent and booked the last connection.  “You will have five hours between your scheduled arrival in Paris and your flight to Edinburg.  I would recommend you sleep on the plane.”

“And you’re just flying to Mexico?”  I asked because he didn’t seem the type to just flee the law.  He had something planned.  

I knew him too well.  Vulpes grinned at me, which made me shudder just a little.  “I will be seeking out the last of the Legion’s outposts and eliminating them around the globe.”

I couldn’t decide if I liked the sound of that enough to outweigh my discomfort at how much he seemed like he’d enjoy doing it.  

Vulpes gestured for the exit.  “We should start walking towards the courthouse.  My men will be setting up here soon and they will be able to watch the Legion through their scopes so they can tell Joshua when the time is right.”

I frowned.  “The Legion are already there?”

He nodded.  “They only just arrived, but the guards were not prepared.  The courthouse is in turmoil but the Legion far outnumbers the defenders.  They will have taken the building very soon.”

That made enough sense that I agreed.  With the courthouse already occupied, Vulpes just carried his rifle openly, not even trying to hide the pistol, ammo, and grenades he was also carrying.  I had my pistol and a lot of ammo, as well as a rifle.  Jack had his pistol in one hand.  

As distracted as any police and civilians would already be, Vulpes still opted to stick to alleys and side streets rather than walking openly along major sidewalks.  We still ended up huddled in the shadowy doorway of a closed lawyer’s office across the street from the courthouse.  There wasn’t much room, and Jack being the least heavily armed, he stood mostly in the open and rested his back against the rifle I was holding across my chest.  Vulpes pressed himself into the opposite side of the archway, giving me as much space as possible.  

Vulpes had been right, the Legion had clearly taken over the building.  A corpse sprawled on the steps and I could see two armed legionaries waiting behind an overturned steel desk between the propped-open front doors.  I’d already started suspecting what kind of distraction Joshua had planned and he proved me right when I heard an engine rev up the hill and rapidly draw nearer.  

I guess this was what he’d meant about fearing cars.  

Graham’s SUV hurtled down the street and flew over the curb, launching the front end up and letting the tires grip the steps.  Those legionaries might have been trained to face a lot of things without fear, but even they balked at the black Trailblazer flying towards their barricade.  The desk crumpled at the same time that the top of the doorway sheared off the vehicle’s roof.  

I felt Jack shudder against my rifle but by the time I looked down he seemed focused again.  “Are you okay?”

“The thing with the roof, just…. unsettled me.”

I shifted my arms to hug him around the gun.  “It’s okay, Jack.”

*       *       *

I don’t know if Vulpes felt jealous or if he just thought we were going to waste time, because he murmured, “We should go,” and proceeded to limp towards the courthouse.  Arcade hugged me a moment longer, seemingly in defiance of Vulpes and he surprised me with a kiss I wasn’t expecting as he stepped out into the street.  

He grinned at my surprise.  “He _is_ right, we should head in there.”

I nodded.  By now I could already hear gunfire within the building and Vulpes was nearly inside.  Arcade and I followed him in.  

Joshua had gone into the hallway past the first room.  He had cover inside a doorway as he fired at a group of legionaries leaning out of a courtroom at the end of the hall.  The SUV sat ruined and smoldering in the center of the room, the desk and several legionaries crushed underneath it and blood smeared across the marble floor in its wake.  The rest of the room was littered with bodies, all Legion and all shot, presumably by Graham.  

Vulpes and Arcade both had their rifles at the ready and moved into the room like they’d been soldiers all their lives.  Vulpes pretty much had, and I guess Arcade had as well, in his own way.  They were both very much in their element; they looked like they did this all the time, even Vulpes with his ankle, and here I was awkwardly trailing behind them with my tiny pistol that felt too heavy in my hands.  I felt like a kid playing soldier, I’d almost rather fight with my feet, though I appreciated the ranged weapon.  

Something exploded further into the building around the time that Arcade and Vulpes finished their sweep of the room.  Graham called back to us, “Your men think the Legion numbers are a bit lower than they should be.  Lanius is here, but this may be an advance group to take and fortify the building, in which case the others are probably meant to lie in wait to ambush the police.  It doesn’t look like they expected us.”

Vulpes leaned against the wall for cover and to take some weight off his leg.  “Well according to the Legion, you were killed.”

Arcade took cover against the wall across from Vulpes as Graham replied.  “Caesar has refused to admit that he failed to kill me.  I might hope that Lanius would have believed his lies, but I highly doubt that.”  

I stood awkwardly beside the hallway entrance, holding my pistol the way Arcade had showed me until he beckoned me over and I realized that I’d been stupidly out of cover.  Joshua gave Vulpes a strange look but said nothing and focused back on the hallway.  

*      *       *

Jack was making rookie mistakes, but the man had no real combat training and I wasn’t surprised.  If we hadn’t needed everyone we could get, I would have insisted that he head onward to Mexico, or Scotland, but he did have a real knack for combat when he needed to fight.  Joshua hadn’t seen Jack fight like I had.  As much as I knew the man was no soldier, I also knew that having him on our side could be a huge asset.  Joshua probably thought I was blinded by my feelings.  I knew the ex-Legate was not fond of homosexuality, and I knew that he had easily picked up on the relationships Jack had had with both Arcade and myself.  He would not openly harass us, he respected that we were on his side in this battle, and he preferred to lead by example so he wouldn’t attack us for it, as he would attack those who murdered innocents, but he strongly disapproved.  I don’t think it helped that, aside from Jack’s apparent interest in fighting the Legion, which Graham seemed to mistake for a reflection of the Jack’s own morals, Graham had little to no respect for the writer.  

Jack surely did not demonstrate any skill as he followed us uncertainly through the building.  Halfway down the hallway Joshua had already cleared, the building opened in a round atrium lined with a staircase.  With our rifles, we carefully picked off the Legion men on the staircase and the landings, clearing our way upwards.  The three of us who knew combat better exchanged a glance.  Those stairs were ridiculously exposed.  

But the elevator was more surely a deathtrap.  We had no choice.  Joshua and I went first as we could aim faster.  We crept up the first few steps, scanning the higher floors and looking for anyone waiting to shoot us.  Arcade and Jack trailed behind us, keeping about half a floor down, the former covering the latter because Jack quite clearly had no idea what he was doing.  

We didn’t have any trouble until we reached the second floor landing and let Jack and Arcade catch up.  Joshua had planned to sweep this floor, just to make sure that no one snuck up behind us, but we were interrupted before we left the landing.  

A grenade flew over the railing to land at my feet.  Graham started to yell a warning, Arcade hauled Jack backwards towards a wall that probably could have shielded them, and Jack didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on.  I reacted almost instinctively.  

I grabbed the grenade before it had stopped rolling and flung the thing upwards off the balcony.  At least one person swore and a mad scramble ensued and was quickly drown out by the explosion.  Jack and Arcade stared at me in shock while Joshua, unfazed, started checking the rooms around us.  

“Your first instinct is to _grab_ a live grenade?  Don’t dive for cover, don’t run away, just _throw it back_?”  

I turned calmly towards Arcade, who has just spoken.  “Yes.”  

The doctor raised his eyebrows.  “Well…  Well, that worked much better than I’d expected.  Good job.”

I acknowledged his thanks.  “I have spent many years ensuring I am prepared if Lanius should ever attack me.  Believe me, I have expected to do exactly what I just did countless times before and, perhaps luckily, I never needed to until now.”

Presumably expecting that I would not be able to do the same thing twice, another live grenade landed at my feet a few seconds later.  This time, Jack actually recognized what was happening but no one moved aside from myself.  I did exactly what I’d done with the last one, to the same effect.  A third grenade did not follow.  

Joshua returned to proclaim the floor empty.  He conveyed the message with a nod, the floor above us had been silent since the grenade and none of us wanted to make much sound.  I didn’t expect that we could have killed them; they were up there, just keeping quiet as we were or else they thought they could fool us.  Lanius was almost certainly among them; the Legion explosive bunker had been one of the targets detonated by Alerio and Cato, so the only grenades they should have access to were Lanius’ personal stash.  

We headed up to the next floor.  The landing was slick with the remains of at least two men.  There seemed to be one more floor above this one, but all the doors visible from the landing were closed, which could mean that they were waiting here for us.  Joshua went wordlessly to clear the floor and I joined him, leaving Jack and Arcade to watch the stairs.  

After a few empty rooms, we found our first surprise.  

It was not an ambush.  

We had not checked for traps as we had not expected the Legion to have had the time to set them yet.  Opening that door, I felt a tripwire snap and shut it immediately.  Joshua and I both dove out of the way as a precaution and our prudence proved necessary when the door exploded outward as soon as we were clear.  Judging from the wreckage, a grenade bouquet had been rigged to the door.  Assuming Lanius had the dozen grenades that he usually carried, he had eight left.  

We checked the rest of the doors before we opened them and found another four grenades, set up in pairs as traps.  Lanius was down to four.  

On this floor, the main hallway ended in a perpendicular hallway lined with offices.  We heard chaos erupt outside at the same time that Graham and I reached this hallway and found most of the remaining Legion force within the building.  

*      *      *

There was one window on the third floor landing, it wasn’t close by and it looked out towards a billboard across the street, but I could see it from where I was waiting beside the hallway, trying to stand like I knew what I was doing.  

I heard shouting and gunfire outside and glimpsed the chaos before I realized that I was hearing the same from in here as well.  

Cops had pulled up outside and hunkered behind the open doors of their vehicles, shooting at a hoard of legionaries who were similarly taking cover.  I hardly registered the initial confrontation before legionaries began dropping like flies.  Every few seconds one of them would go flying, streaming crimson where his head used to be.  The snipers struck first, some of the shots were probably Cato’s or Alerio’s, but others came from the opposite direction, equally out of reach of the Legion.  I saw the Legion starting to divide their attention as unseen assailants approached to harry them from the opposite side as the cops.  

That was when Arcade turned around to help Vulpes and Graham, who hadn’t asked for help but certainly didn’t seem to be faring well right now, considering these legionaries weren’t dead yet.  “Jack, watch the stairs,” he whispered and rushed down the hall.  

He didn’t exactly give me a chance to protest.  

I held my gun like a golf club and eyed the ascending steps.  It sounded quiet up there.  At least this seemed easy enough.  

*       *       *

Graham and I couldn’t watch both ends of the hall at once and with the Legion able to easily track the aim of any one man, we couldn’t land a shot until Arcade joined us.  As soon as he was there, aiming unpredictably in either direction, the legionaries couldn’t always watch all three of us.  It took longer than I would have liked; they’d laid a skilled ambush, but we gradually picked them off.  

We realized halfway through the fight that we heard combat elsewhere, but we couldn’t do much about that until we cleared the hallway or we’d be trapped between two groups of Legion soldiers; Arcade either realized this or mistook the sound for part of the battle outside.   

Glancing towards the stairs during a lull in the shooting, I saw Jack fending off legionaries coming down the stairs.  The man fought surprisingly well.  

He held his gun and at least two of the bodies around him had been killed by a gunshot, as I watched him, he aimed to fire at a centurion rushing towards him.  When he pulled the trigger, the gun clicked and they both realized he’d forgotten to reload.  The centurion laughed and aimed at him and Jack responded with an incredibly fast high-kick that toppled the man over the railing of the landing.  Before we all heard the crash of metal armor on marble flooring fifty feet below, Jack reloaded and shot the next four men down the stairs before needing to reload again.  By this point, corpses blocked the ascending stairs and Arcade and Graham had cleared out the hallway where we’d been fighting.  

Seeing all of us staring at him in surprise, Jack, clearly more than a little amazed by his own unexpected competence, beamed at us and proclaimed happily, presumably regarding his general ineptitude with firearms, “I regret nothing!”  

The words hardly left his mouth when, in a repeat of his earlier tactics, Lanius threw a grenade down to this balcony.  It landed by Jack’s foot, amid the pile of bodies surrounding him,  and Jack luckily recognized what it was.  He bolted, vaulting a desk that had been pushed into the hallway and covering the fifteen meters between us in about two seconds.  However frantic his movements and as long as it had been since he’d competed, Jack ran with enough skill to show he had professional training.  We were too busy ducking into the hallway to marvel at his speed at the time.  

Arcade grabbed Jack’s arm and hauled him around the corner as the blast went off.  It probably wrenched the doctor’s arm painfully, but it yanked Jack out of the path of the shockwave and shrapnel.  On the blood-slick marble of the hallway where we stood, Jack’s sprint and subsequent redirection not only nearly pulled Arcade off his feet but swung Jack straight into a wall.  

He groaned and stepped backwards, rubbing his nose, which was bleeding again.  “I regret everything.”  

*       *       *

Jack could run that fast?  Jeez, I’d thought he had legs as strong as he did just from horseback riding, but he ran like an Olympian.  Just when I thought he had no really useful talents for this fight, he proved me wrong, again.  Granted, as much as I was glad that he’d run fast enough to escape the blast, my arm wouldn’t hurt nearly as much right now if he’d been going just a little slower.  

I guess his speed surprised Graham too, because the man who had hardly looked at Jack with anything but frustration now gave him a careful stare that seemed to reappraise the young man’s many talents.  He glanced from Jack, who was trying to stop the bleeding of his nose and didn’t even notice Graham watching him, down the hallway to the mess that had been Jack’s end of the fight.  

“Perhaps Vulpes was correct in his opinion of your skills.”  

Jack looked up, blood still streaming down his face.  “…Thanks.”  

Graham’s approval surprised Jack as much as his unexpected success amazed me.  The normally serious ex-Legate seemed to smile before continuing down the hallway.  He joined Vulpes on the landing, watching the stairs and presumably trying to determine if it was safe to ascend.  

It sounded like the battle outside had poured into the building below us, but it hadn’t reached the stairs and we had to focus on Lanius.  Jack gave up on his nose for now and tore off part of his sleeve to tie around his head across his high cheekbones like a cross between a bandana and a mask.  He grinned at me.  “At least there can’t be too many left now, right?”

“Don’t say things like that.”  I chuckled, “When you say that, I feel like we’ll find fifty of them waiting upstairs.”

Jack grinned and as I headed back towards the landing, he pranced around me (apparently he was in a good mood, he’d had a spring in his step all day when he wasn’t in a car) and kissed me.  He really had a knack for doing that at unexpected times, didn’t he?  

I stifled a laugh.  “You know, I’m not sure this it the best time for that.”

He bobbled his head, “Fair point.”

I nearly joked about what had happened on the container ship but decided against that in case Graham was within earshot.  

*       *       *

The next floor was the building’s highest.  With only the stairs and the elevator for access, Lanius had surely laid a trap, and we had no choice but to walk straight into it.  

Once Jack and Arcade caught up with us, Graham went upstairs first and I followed.  

At the final landing, we faced a hallway filled with overturned desks positioned like barricades to provide cover in a gunfight.  Lanius himself could not hide behind one, but his men could, and as this was another hallway that formed a T-shape, Lanius might well be waiting for us at the intersection.  I took cover on the landing, near the entrance to the hallway and Jack and Arcade mirrored my position on the other side.  Graham slunk into the hallway between us, starting to scale the first overturned desk.  I barely heard the snap of a wire before he leaped backwards.  I dove out of the way and Arcade did the same, dragging a clueless Jack with him.  Graham was on the landing beside me as the grenade trap deafened us and flung three desks over the balcony, taking the railing with them.  

“How many grenades?”

Graham answered as he started back towards the hallway.  “Two.”

So Lanius was down to his last one.  Good.  

I joined Joshua while Arcade and Jack covered the landing, watching us as we checked every door we passed.  We saw nothing before the perpendicular hallway.  Lanius must have been listening for us.  

He lunged at Graham, who stood slightly closer to him than I did.  Before I had a chance to fire, Lanius slammed what seemed to be a punch at Graham and it happened too quickly for me to notice what he was holding.  Luckily, Graham _did_ notice.  

The Malpais Legate reacted instantly, slamming his towering replacement with a knee to the groin that caused Lanius to stumble.  Graham ripped the grenade from his hand and flung it off the balcony in a pitch that would have made any baseball player proud.  It fell out of sight in a few seconds of silence before we heard a screamed Latin warning followed by the explosion.  Judging from their expressions, Jack and Arcade didn’t fail to note the significance of that shout.  

Graham shoved his pistol towards the new Legate’s throat and Lanius deflected it just before it fired.  I struggled to find a clear shot between the man’s armor and the quick and powerful movements of the legates wrestling with each other.  

The fight was ultimately short-lived.  

No doubt having heard of the Legate’s attachment to his mask, Joshua gripped the edge of it and struggled to wrench it off his face.  Rage and size gave Lanius the upper hand.  However legendary Joshua’s durability, Lanius slammed the smaller man with his forearm, tearing Joshua off of him and slamming the burned man into the wall.  I heard the wet smack as the back of Joshua’s skull struck the marble.  He dropped to his knees and I didn’t see if he was even alive before Lanius rounded on me.  

A high-caliber shot shredded the crimson crest of Lanius’ helmet.  Jack and Arcade had come down the hallway to help us.  The legate rounded on Arcade like a rabid bear.  

A gunshot ricocheted past us from somewhere on the stairwell as Arcade’s next shot bounced off the legate’s armor and Lanius charged at him.  Jack tugged Arcade out of the way before the doctor could sidestep on his own and the writer made an attempt as valiant as it was insane to knock Lanius to the floor.  He did at least use an actual take-down maneuver that might have had the strength to knock down a man less used to combat and less prepared to compensate for the shift in his center of gravity.  Lanius punched Jack, aiming for his nose and connecting at an angle I couldn’t see well enough to analyze.  Jack stumbled and I presumed that his broken nose had been fractured again and he’d be dazed for several minutes, considering how he’d reacted to his last nose-break.  With no one between him and Arcade, Lanius turned to the doctor, who was frantically struggling to reload.  I shot and took a few more red hairs off the legate’s helmet but failed to draw his attention.  Lanius leveled a punch that could have shattered a man’s skull and raised his right arm as well, in a less dramatic motion.  Arcade dodged the first punch but not the second, which hit his chest and probably fractured his collar bone.  Lanius had been aiming for the throat, so his miss was a small miracle in and of itself.  Lanius closed even more and raised his foot for a knee strike.  

His earlier punch had missed Jack’s nose, possibly because of the cloth that covered it.  Jack had a black eye already showing up, but had not been knocked out of the fight, as everyone including Lanius seemed to have thought.  When the legate lifted his foot, Jack lunged.  He hit the man with a palm strike to the side of the head, which might have been accidental, while Jack swung a leg upward to catch Lanius in the arm pit and send him stumbling towards the stairwell.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one desperately hoping the Legate would topple off the landing, but he caught himself on a pillar beside the descending stairs.  

*       *       *

Even with my eyes streaming from pain and while I was struggling to breathe, I could see Jack nearly knock Lanius off the ledge.  The placement of Jack’s kick could have ruptured arteries and a stab would there would have almost certainly been fatal, but for a change it seemed like luck was against him.  Lanius caught himself and eyed Jack with a new level of hatred.  I heard him wheezing for breath but didn’t fully register the significance until later.  

As always, Jack’s heroism fast faded to fear and he hauled me backwards down the hallway.  Wheezing a bit myself I wasn’t in a position to argue with him even though I didn’t rationally realize why he’d retreated until I could breathe again.  Before Jack had knocked him over, Lanius’ knee had knocked the wind out of me and between that and all the other pain I was in right now, I was a little distracted.  

With Lanius between us and the stairs, and with the elevator also on the landing, even if it hadn’t been a deathtrap, our only choice right now was to find somewhere to hole up and hope we could hold Lanius off.  Jack and I reached Vulpes and paused.  Graham hadn’t moved.  Vulpes stooped to check for a pulse as Lanius regained his footing at the other end of the hallway, but he didn’t seem to find anything.  The frumentarius stood up and shook his head.  

Jack had opened the door to the office behind us.  “Guys, would this work?  It looks defensible.”

That was an understatement.  Lanius had clearly fortified the place in case things went badly for him; he’d created a barricade of overturned steel desks and set up metal spikes and barbed wire to keep people from climbing over.  We all dashed around the barricade and shoved it against the door before Lanius reached us.  

Vulpes, Jack, and I crouched behind the desk like soldiers in trenches by the time Lanius stood in the doorway, panting.  He took the rifle off Graham’s body and hunkered down, taking cover beside the doorway of the office we were in while he treated us to a proclamation of his ambitions.  “You only delay the inevitable.  The Legion will crush this city’s pitiful police and all within it’s borders will become slaves or die.  Soon this whole country will be united under the Legion flag.”  Listening to the wet crackle of his breath, I couldn’t decide if his threat was genuine delusion or just insanity.  

Jack frowned at me.  Over the chaos rapidly approaching up the stairs, he spoke softly enough that Lanius couldn’t have heard him.  “Does he sound sick to you?”

“Of course.  Everyone in the Legion has to be crazy or they wouldn’t play along with  Caesar’s ridiculous fascist anachronism in the first place, but yes, Lanius sounds like he has fluid in his lungs.”  I listened for a moment.  Lanius was only a few feet away and he was breathing pretty loudly.  “He’s breathing a bit faster than I’d expect.”  Amid the scent of smoke  and blood, I couldn’t necessarily smell if he was septic, and I certainly wasn’t about to take his temperature, but judging from his breathing, he could be septic, possibly in septic shock, in which case he’d probably be dead within the hour even if we did nothing.  Or he might have a punctured lung that would kill him much more slowly.  Or pneumonia.  Or maybe he just had a cold.  I couldn’t be sure without an examination I’d never have a chance to conduct.  

Jack was ever hopeful.  “Are you saying he might be septic?”

I shrugged.  “That or half a dozen other possibilities.”

Vulpes frowned over the barricade, even though he probably couldn’t see Lanius.  “I was septic, wasn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Then surely Lanius isn’t thinking clearly if that is the case.”

Another optimist.  I shrugged.  “Yes, but I’m not sure we’re going to be lucky enough for that.”

Jack smiled as he checked that his pistol was ready to fire.  “We’re going to get lucky, one way or another.”  He looked at us when we both stared at him and added, “And I did _not_ mean that as a euphemism.  This time.”

Such optimism from the guy who’d been depressed the past few months.  I guess the tables had turned.  Literally as well, considering the desk we were all leaning against.  

My theory of septic shock was proved wrong when Lanius held us there for over an hour, according to the clock on the floor in the corner of the office, but he wasn’t doing any better.  I could still hear him wheezing.  A group of legionaries had come up the stairs and wanted to assist him, but Lanius told them to cover the landing, and they needed to.  I guess the cops had called in the National Guard or something, because the landing was under constant assault by a wide range of weapons.  At the time, I couldn’t possibly imagine that our rag-tag group of allies had done what the cops couldn’t and driven the Legion force to retreat.  Unfortunately, whoever this was had driven the Legion to retreat right towards us.  

As the thirty or so remaining legionaries held off what I presumed were police or worse, I considered our options.  Lanius was still alive and we had way too many legionaries down the hall to get past them on our own.  Even if we somehow got past the Legion, or if they were killed, we’d be headed towards the National Guard or at least the cops.  And whether or not they realized we were on their side, they would almost certainly detain us, and then they’d find out Vulpes was one of the Legion’s head honchos, and I was the son of rogue C.I.A. operatives who’d been wanted for decades.  

Vulpes waited like a soldier, never taking his eyes off the doorway, but he had the slightly shallow breathing of a man in intense pain.  He’d done a lot of walking lately and I hadn’t watched him closely enough to see if he might have fallen on his ankle.  He wasn’t going after Lanius, and even if the legate gave him an opening, he might not have been able to catch it.  

We weren’t necessarily screwed, but we were stuck here, and I was starting to consider an idea that seemed like the kind of thing Jack would have tried.  Well, several ideas like that, I guess, but only one was really drastic.  

I turned to Vulpes.  “Is your leg alright?”

Jack seemed as puzzled by this as Vulpes clearly was.  “I can still shoot, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It’s not.”  If we were going to die here, I had something I needed to tell him, and right now, that seemed very likely.  The Legion would sooner try to clear and take this room than face the army coming up the stairs, and they’d surely figure that out in the next few minutes.  “Look…I may have misjudged you.  Sorry.”

Vulpes gave me a puzzled glance and then nodded.  “I believe we misjudged _each other_.  Thank you.  You’ve saved my life at least twice now and I am grateful for the effort.”

I did the math.  “Possibly three times, the bone fragments in your ankle were fairly close to an artery, but I appreciate the thanks.”

He nodded.  

Down the hall a Legionary cried out and fell off the balcony during a burst of automatic weapons fire that was answered in kind by the Legion.  

Lanius, apparently realizing that they’d need to take this room to have any chance against the army on the stairs, taunted us.  “Do you really think you stand any chance?  Soon, the army of the Legion will march over you easily.  Do you really think a disgraced frumentarius, his profligate whore, and Caesar’s pet stand any chance against us?”

“ _Yes_.”  Vulpes answered in defiance before I had a chance to process a response.  That last jab had really gotten to me, much more than I wanted to admit.  Now I wanted Lanius dead more than ever and that anger cemented my decision.  

Jack hardly seemed to acknowledge the insult directed at him.  Given his job and mentality, he probably didn’t even consider “whore” an insult, but he looked visibly pissed off when Lanius insulted me.  He drummed his fingers on his knee restlessly and I turned towards him.  

*      *      *

I had no idea what to expect when Arcade looked at me.  After what he’d just said to Vulpes, and after what Lanius had called him, I was a little afraid that he was planning something suicidal.  For once, I wasn’t thinking along the same lines.  

“A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,  
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;  
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted  
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:  
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,  
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;  
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,  
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.  
And for a woman wert thou first created;  
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,  
And by addition me of thee defeated,  
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.  
   But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,  
   Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.”

He recited the sonnet out of nowhere and caught me so off guard that I just stared blankly for almost a full minute.  Arcade smiled.  “Well, that wasn’t the reaction I was hoping—”

I kissed him before he could finish that sentence and for a change, he kissed me back almost immediately.  We might have forgotten the battle around us until something exploded outside and we broke the kiss.  

“You sure this is the best time for that?”  As blissful as that sonnet had made me, it was so completely unexpected and romantic, that I couldn’t help but dread that this might have been the precursor to a last stand.  

Arcade drew his legs up underneath him, ready to vault the barricade.  “I didn’t want to die without doing that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a song title, as usual.   
> I hadn't intended to break this chapter here, but it was getting much longer than I wanted, so there will be one last chapter before the epilogue. Cliff-hanger ending is mostly because it was the best place to break. The next chapter will be the last one.


	53. Fortune Favors the Brave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter, aside from the epilogue.

I’d looked away when they kissed and only just glanced back when Arcade leapt over the barricade.  The man was rarely if ever graceful, per say, but he did clear the barbed wire and spikes.  My first instinct to stop him faded with the simple certainty that we couldn’t stay here forever and, sooner rather than later, the Legion would be driven to retreat.  They had no where to go but this room.  Jack gawked at me like I should have stopped the doctor and moved to follow, but I grabbed him and hauled him back behind cover.  All of this happened in barely a second.  

Having cleared the barricade, Arcade was only a step from the doorway.  His hesitation suggested that he’d expected to be dead by now, but by some miracle, Lanius hadn’t noticed him.  Whoever was on the stairs seemed to be pushing upwards, and quite successfully.  The legionaries on the landing yelled a mix of curses and orders so constantly that it was clear the chain of command had been broken.  Lanius barked an order to hold position and turned their attention our way long enough for the legionaries to notice Arcade.  One of them started to shout a warning, but I never heard the rest of his sentence.  

Lanius realized what was going on and loomed in the doorway, rifle at the ready.  Whatever his prowess, Lanius was clearly unhealthy and probably in more pain than most men could handle.  He fired wildly but Arcade reacted more quickly.  In the small room, the first shot deafened me, and probably everyone else.  I saw Jack scream something and try again to lunge at Lanius, but I held him in place by his injured shoulder and he fell back to his knees, narrowly missed by a hail of bullets that blasted a line in the wall behind us.  

Neither of us knew what had just happened until we poked our heads up over the desk a few seconds later.  Or rather Jack poked his head over the edge of the desk and I awkwardly craned my neck to see.  I’d needed to turn around to have the leverage to restrain the scotsman, and doing so left my ankle in a position where turning to the side became exceedingly painful.  

*      *      *

By some miracle I was still alive.  Lanius had to be septic, he might have actually gone into shock by now, but I’d preempted a more natural death.  Feverish and soaked in sweat in an already warm building, Lanius had loosened his armor and left his neck more visibly exposed than it usually was.  With his head to the side, keeping half an eye on the staircase but probably planning to focus on me, I’d noticed I had a clear shot at his throat.  I hadn’t thought of anything beyond that.  I hadn’t hesitated, luckily, and I hadn’t really processed what a .50 caliber did to a neck at point-blank range.  

The vertebrae damn near exploded.  I fired as soon as I saw the opening and Lanius shot as my bullet hit, either as his last action or due to the muscle spasms.  The burst of automatic weapons fire seemed to miss me and I heard it destroy part of the wall, but I was more focused on Lanius.  His head was _gone_.  One shot shredded his muscles and arteries and blasted through his spine, decapitating him completely in a spray of incredibly dark blood.  He was definitely septic, if he hadn’t been in shock, he was close to it.  The walls became very dark brown in the doorway and I wasn’t completely out of the spray.  Luckily, none of it got in my eyes or mouth, but the shirt and jeans I’d been wearing wouldn’t be wearable again.  

For nearly a minute I just stared blankly at the corpse.  He was actually dead.  Somehow, I was alive, and the last real leader of the Legion was dead _by my hand_.  If I hadn’t felt like I was dreaming before, I certainly did now.  I didn’t even notice the legionaries down the hall staring at us in shock.  I did notice when Jack slammed into me and knocked us both into the hallway.  My back took most of the impact.  

“Fuck!”  

“Don’t you ever do that to me again!”  Jack seemed completely oblivious to my pain or the twenty men now starting to glare at us.  He had his arms wrapped around me in a hug that was surprisingly tight considering his injured shoulder and he had his face buried in my chest.  I think he was crying, but I couldn’t tell if I was feeling the dampness of tears or blood.  

“Jack…”  I tried to pry his arms off me while I watched the legionaries and kept one hand carefully on my gun.  

The nearest legionary finally found his voice.  “Retribu—!”

Bam!  “Retribution.”  Vulpes shot before I could level my gun around Jack.  Limping with a surprising amount of swagger, he turned his rifle on the next closest legionary.  He didn’t need to fire.  

In a thunder of boots, ten people rushed onto the landing and two of them mowed down the last of the legionaries.  

“Sixty-five.”

“Sixty-seven.”

“Sixty-seven?  What the hell kind of math are you doing, that was sixty-three.”

“Look, you can count the bullets—”

“Oh, like you never miss!”

“I miss less than you do—”

“Gentlemen!”

I marveled at them, not even caring that Jack still wouldn’t let go of me.  “Judah?  Johnson?  That was _you_ driving them back?”  It was my family, of sorts, along with Lily, Raul, Veronica, and Cass.  Most of my family had on helmets or ski masks, anything to hide their faces.  Raul had a shotgun and an array of ammo and pistols as well as, surprisingly, a very Mexican outfit.  Vero had put on the largest set of brass knuckles I’d ever seen.  Cass had her own gun and a hip flask she stopped to down now that they’d reached us.  Lily, of course, had her enormous helicopter rotor, now soaked with blood.  

Judah laughed, “Of course, Arcade.  Who else did you expect?”

Now, I knew they were capable.  I had figured they could sway the tide by being here and I expected them to impress, but even with Lily, two mechanics, Calamity, and Cass, I didn’t think that five old-timers who usually spent their time complaining about arthritis and playing cards would be able to so effectively route an army.  Not that I was going to let on exactly how doomed I’d thought we had been.  

“Well, the National Guard, honestly, from the sound of you working your way up here.”

Daisy took note of my shirt before Veronica could do so.  “You okay?”

“We’re fine.”

I tried to pry Jack off of me and this time I succeeded.  He stepped back, the strip of cloth around his face now soaked with a nasty mix of tears and blood.  With blood on his hands and most of his arms from my shirt, he didn’t bother to dry his eyes and he wasn’t crying anymore right now.  I noticed a flash of crimson on his forearms that didn’t match the dark red of Lanius’ blood and figured his nose had started bleeding again.  Jack didn’t notice and made a valiant effort to compose himself.  

Lily, Vero, Cass, and Daisy all looked like they would have hugged us if we weren’t soaked in blood and who knows what else.  Daisy spoke up before I could ask how things were going outside.  Everything hurt and right now I really just wanted to be clean and safe and relatively comfortable for a while.  Getting out of here would be ideal, if we could safely leave.  

“Where’s that bandaged friend of yours?”

I gestured back towards where Graham’s corpse had been only to find that it was gone.  Vulpes raised his eyebrows.  “It seems the Malpais Legate has once again cheated death.”

“He just _left_?” I frowned at him, “We thought he was _dead._ ”

Vulpes shrugged.  “No doubt, he wishes to leave before the police arrive.”

“Oh,” Vero explained, “The police are already here.  Or they were.  You know, there were a _lot_ of Legion guys, and a lot of guns.  I think a few cops are still around somewhere out there.  Maybe.”

“Boone and some other snipers have been clearing out the Legion outside,” Raul explained, “We ran into him on the way down, but I have no idea who the other snipers might be.”

“They’re my men.” Vulpes replied.  

“Oh.”  Raul chuckled.  “The three of them have a lot of work to do.  Once we broke the lines, a bunch of legionaries ran off.  Those bright red uniforms will really help them blend into the civilians.”

They gave us a pretty detailed account of how things had gone.  The cops had showed up, the majority of the Legion force had arrived behind them and tried to catch them in the crossfire.  Most cops had died and then our friends had arrived along with some kind of Air Force tour group that happened to be in the area at the time and a handful of folks who just joined the fighting because they felt like it, according to Veronica.  Our friends had driven the Legion into the courthouse after the cops were dead and they felt confident that we’d be safe if we left now, although, Calamity warned, “There was some talk on the police radio about `bringing in the big guns.’”

Knowing that we probably had only a brief window to leave before more cops showed up, they explained quickly and we were down the stairs before the blood had dried on my shirt.  

I walked toward the back of the group and Daisy fell back to walk beside me.  “What exactly are you planning after this?  You can’t really stay here with your cover blown…”

“I’m moving to Scotland.”  Jack, walking beside me and apparently lost in thought, heard this and coughed.   I looked over at him.  “Right?”

The cough seemed like a coincidence; he nodded.  “Yeah.  Of course.”  

I turned back towards Daisy to find her frowning judgmentally.  

“What?”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Yes.”  I wasn’t actually one hundred percent positive, but I couldn’t stay here and I did want to be with Jack, whatever he’d been convinced to do.  As insane as the past few days had been, I couldn’t fully process the decision, but I didn’t plan to break up with him, and moving wherever he wanted to go seemed like the best way to keep that ridiculous, charming, and incredibly surprising scotsman in my life.  

Jack stepped around me to talk to Daisy while we walked.  “You fly helicopters, right?”

He knew she did, and she knew that too.  I guess asking was his way of being polite because I really didn’t think he would have forgotten.  

“Yes…”

“If you want— I don’t know if you need to move as well, or not— but you could fly on my island.  I know it’s not really military or all that exciting, I guess, but there’s a tour company that flies people around when the weather’s good, if you want.”  

By now the entire small group was watching him, though I’m pretty sure they were less interested in the offer than in the fact that he owned an island.  Vero frowned, “You own the island where you live?”

Jack nodded.  

Moreno laughed.  “Oh, he owns an _island_ , that explains a lot.”  I was pretty sure he meant that to imply I was a gold-digger.  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.  _Moreno_ …

Daisy’s face lit up a bit but she seemed conflicted.  She still didn’t trust Jack and I’m pretty sure that in her eyes no one would ever be good enough for me, but she loved to fly and had missed it so deeply since she’d left the C.I.A.  “Well… if we can work out the logistics of it…”

Jack beamed.  “We can get Arcade past customs, I’m sure we can sort it out.”  He made it sound like I was contraband.  

We emerged into a fairly cold, clear night on steps absolutely paved with gore and corpses.  No-Bark stood among them, splattered with blood and holding the pocket knife he always carried.  He looked around, not noticing us.  “Any more of you commie bastards looking to get the jump on old No-Bark?  You’ll get what’s coming to ya!”  

Any other combatants that might have helped fight had already dispersed and in the city where practically anything was possible, there weren’t many people out here to gawk at the carnage.  One man, a swimmer, presumably, considering he was good-looking, carrying a towel,  and wearing nothing but a Speedo paused on the sidewalk to stare our way.  Between the massacre, No-Bark, and our mismatched and bloody group, I had no idea what in particular had caught his attention.  

Raul and Veronica went to calm No-Bark down while Jack picked his way though the corpses towards the garage.  “We should probably get to the car.”  Jack eagerly approaching a car ride seemed about as uncharacteristic as his sudden respect of danger, but I quickly realized just how carefully he was averting his eyes from the swimmer.  I sighed as I followed him.  If he got a boner now, so help me…  

After Vulpes pointed out that, regardless of the time constraint, no sane airport security agent would let us fly covered in gore, we stopped at Jack’s house to change clothes and shower.  Jack seemed slightly more comfortable in the car, presumably because he was still relieved we’d survived the battle.  He didn’t seem bothered by Speedo-man anymore, but I was driving and didn’t want to distract myself by looking too closely.  This wasn’t really the best time for that anyway, for a whole lot of different reasons.  

This all still felt eerie to me.  I couldn’t quite believe that in just a few days I’d gone from a slave, doomed to die in the Legion, either by my own hand or theirs, to a free man who’d killed the Legion’s last leader and survived.  I felt like I’d wake up any minute now, and I couldn’t relax for fear of that.  I desperately wanted to believe that this was all real, but it was too perfect.  

Opening Jack’s door with him at my side, we heard the familiar scramble of claws on the hallway floor and Turing rushed into view.  The little dog was overjoyed to see us.  He pranced about and reared up to wave his paws at us before bolting back towards the kitchen.  He slid to a stop in the doorway and wagged his tail, waiting for us to follow.  The dog was adorable.  

We hadn’t expected the dogs to be here, but Cass, who’d tagged along on the excuse that she needed a ride home anyway, explained, “Gibson was taking care of them, but we thought you might be back for good.  We figured you were leaving when we saw the house, but they had to stay somewhere for now.”

I realized that none of our friends, as far as I knew, had a key.  “Didn’t you lock the door?”

Jack shrugged.  “Why bother?”  He had a point; there wasn’t anything really left in the house.  He smiled at Cass as we followed Turing, mostly because Jack had started walking that way.  “I can fly Turing with us, I have the papers and everything.  I had him trained and registered as a service dog, just in case, so he’ll be fine, but Rex will be more tricky to transport.  If Daisy’s moving to Scotland—”

We stopped in the kitchen.  Turing waited happily, wagging his tail and he’d led us to Rex, who stood behind him, watching us just as happily.  The dogs at least had the sense not to touch Jack and I, who were absolutely soaked in blood, but that wasn’t the focus of my attention right now.  Rex knew how to open the pantry to get food for himself and, as the entire house had been empty, the big dog had taken offense to the idea of a house without food.  The pantry door had been ripped completely off its hinges and now lay scattered in splintered, chewed fragments all around the room.  The _walls_ had also been chewed and scratched and even the edges of the kitchen counters and windowsills.  The dog had done more damage to the house than I’d thought any dog could ever be capable of doing.  

I laughed and Jack joined me, followed by Cass.  This was no dream.  This was too absurd.  This was just what my life had become living with Jack.  We survived things that would have killed anyone else, we got global terrorist organizations desperately trying to kill us and then wiped them out, and we came home to dog demolitions.  This was crazy, but this was real.  I’d still probably need therapy after this, but it was real.  If this was a dream, we wouldn’t have misbehaving dogs, and we wouldn’t be stuck with Vulpes trailing after us, injured and a third-wheel victim of circumstance.  I wouldn’t be standing here, sore all over and soaked with blood, in the kitchen of a house that had become terrifying for too many reasons to count.  

At that moment, Vulpes hobbled over, frowning curiously at our laughter until he saw the room.  The frumentarius was the only one who hadn’t been thoroughly soaked in gore.  Keeping with his near-supernatural ability to look like a model under any circumstances, he’d hardly gotten any blood on himself.  He hadn’t needed to shower and hadn’t planned to, he just hobbled into the house, washed his arms in the sink, and changed out of his shirt and jeans.  Jack had a change of clothes from his backpack that Cass was carrying (the woman had been way too happy to get the chance to dig through Jack’s underwear) but with my clothes presumably in Scotland and his own who knows where, I had no idea where Vulpes had gotten the dark grey suit and tie he now wore, but he explained when I frowned at it.  

“I left an assortment of clothes in the basement.  Originally, I kept them for my men and myself, but there should be some in your size.  I brought them into the bathroom upstairs.”  I guess his leg was bothering him because, without crutches, he hobbled out of the house and we found him waiting in the car.  The idea of wearing Legion clothes yet again wasn’t thrilling, but at least they weren’t covered in septic blood.  Jack went up to shower first and I waited in his studio.  The curtain was gone, leaving the bar it had hung on and several brass rings.  Without furniture, the wide room felt strange.  The open windows showed the city under moonlight, peaceful after so many months.  The night was as clear and beautiful as the night I’d met Jack, and it reminded me of that.  How the hell had it only been three months?  Not even, depending on the date.  It was late December.  Wait.  When was it _exactly_?

Jack came out of the shower with a towel around his waist.  Even with the horrific scars, and the broken nose now carefully and freshly rebandaged, he still looked stunning.  He’d had Cass carry his clothes so they wouldn’t get covered in the blood that had been all over him and so they wouldn’t be on the floor where Turing would claim them as his new bed, and she had paced the bedroom with an arm full of tartan and t-shirt.  Jack, evidently more focused on haste than fashion, had let her grab whatever she wanted as long as it comprised a full and legal outfit, and she’d picked out his kilt and an AC/DC shirt.  She’d dug through every single pair of underwear he’d packed and Jack had let her because he needed her help.  Cass enjoyed the job from the start, but she really loved the view of him in a towel, and just stood there, tracing his body with her eyes and no doubt imagining him without the towel.  

“Damn.  You sure you need these?”

Jack sighed and held out his hand.  “Cass.”

“Alright, alright.  Ya know, I can dress ya, if you want.  Like a butler and all.”

Jack narrowed his eyes.  “They don’t _dress_ us, they just lay out the clothes.”

“Well…here ya go.”  Cass gave him one last, long, hungry stare, and handed the clothes over.  “ _Sir_.”  She gave him a mock bow and started to head downstairs, but paused to eye me.  “Damn.  You really got lucky with _this_ one.”  She laughed at her own pun and finally left.  I hadn’t said anything, partly because we needed someone to hold the clothes and partly because I was _also_ enjoying the view.  And once Cass was out of the room, Jack immediately dropped the towel and grabbed the boxers.  If I hadn’t been covered in blood, I wouldn’t have restrained myself, to hell with the need to flee the country.  

I didn’t realize that Jack was holding something in his left hand until he pulled on the boxers.  The ridiculously tight boxers.  _Of course_ Cass had picked those.  

“What is that?”

He looked up like a deer in the headlights.  “What?”

I stepped a bit closer to him.  “That thing, in your hand.”

He grabbed the kilt and had it on in a matter of seconds.  “It’s nothing.”  He slipped the thing into a pocket that I hadn’t realized his kilt had.  “You should shower.  I can clean and bandage your back once you’re a bit less bloody.”  I tried not to worry that he was hiding something important and let it go.  

“Right…”

Jack waited in the bedroom while I showered.  He’d left his filthy clothes in the corner of the bathroom, across the room from the pile of clean clothes.  I noticed he’d turned out the pockets of his jeans before I threw my own bloody clothes on top of them.  I didn’t bother taking off the bandages yet, I cleaned myself completely three times before pulling them off.  Even if I hadn’t been covered in blood loaded with bacteria and who knows what else, I couldn’t stand the idea of having any part of Lanius inside me.  I had had more than enough of that with the Legion already.  

With almost nothing on my body that didn’t hurt, I didn’t notice any new wounds when I showered, and I presumed I only had my back and stomach, as well as all the bruises everywhere, when I opened the door so Jack could clean my back.  

He gaped.  “Your arm!  Are you okay?”

I gave him a sardonic stare as he rushed over to turn me around and examine a wound on my bicep.  Drips of blood had actually reached my elbow by now and I hadn’t noticed.  “Jack, _everything_ hurts.  I’m lucky to be alive.  What is it now?”

I noticed the first aid kit in the bedroom when he rushed over to grab a tool from it.  “Lanius must have shot you.  At least it doesn’t look infected.”  

“Fuck.”  I swore mostly because he’d just dug into my arm, presumably removing a bullet and not just hoping to find one.  “That Legion bastard.  He just _had_ to shoot me as he died.” 

It was mostly a joke and Jack laughed half-heartedly as he dropped the bullet on the floor.  “At least it was only one bullet, you saw Vulpes’ ankle.”

I frowned at him.  “You were there?”

“I was on my way to rescue you.  Vulpes got ambushed and I heard the fighting.  I guess it was lucky I tried to shoot there, it nearly knocked me out and I would have been killed on my own.  Vulpes shot the only other legionary in the area while I was still reeling.  I killed the guy who broke his ankle, though.  It was hard to miss when I had the gun practically touching his head.”  

At least he hadn’t wasted the bullet.  

Jack tried to change the subject.  “So I’ve been wondering for a while….  I mean, I figure you know what I keep in _my_ box under the bed…”

“I know it’s the books you’ve written.”

“Yeah.  Well….what exactly is in that box you have?”

I’d really been dreading the day he’d ask that.  I didn’t want to talk about it, not just because of the memories and what the box held, but also because it felt awkward to have it there.  It was, in some ways a white elephant, but also a treasure, or, rather, all of the contents were white elephants in and of themselves.  But none so much as the most important one.  

*      *      *

He sighed.  “Well…”  He was awkward about it.  

I tried to help him out with a guess.  “It’s something related to your dad, isn’t it?”

He tilted his head.  “Well… _kind of_ …”

“Kind of?”

“I do have some stuff from his C.I.A. days in there, old photos and his dog tags and stuff…”

“…and?”

“And him.”

I stared, not processing what that meant.  “….huh?”

“Him.  My father.  His…his ashes.”  He turned towards me and stared pacing while he rambled.  “Look, I know it’s…it’s awkward, but it wasn’t like they had a legal funeral for a guy who no longer officially existed.  And he died on a mission, they never told me exactly…how.  Or why, but I guess they couldn’t transport the body, so they cremated him themselves.  And they gave us— my mom and I— his ashes.  And he never really had a place he really liked, in particular, or anything like that, so…  I mean, what do you do?  I guess….well… you kind of have to keep them somewhere.  And I… no offense, I couldn’t really guarantee that I wouldn’t need to leave here quickly, so…  I mean, I kept them in a box for…for years.”

I tried not to show as much shock as I wanted to, I felt like that would make him even more awkward about it.  “So…so you just had his urn under the bed?”

He sighed.  “Yeah.  Kind of.  It’s…  He’s not in an urn so much as a… soda bottle.”

“A soda bottle?”

He shrugged.  “I guess it was all they had at the time.”

Part of me wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but this was his father and he was quite clearly uncomfortable talking about it.  I hugged him.  

“It’s fine.  We can get an urn for him when we get to Scotland.  Or we can just put him somewhere in the house.  Whatever you want.  It’s okay.”

I expected him to cry and he didn’t.  His voice broke, but then he regained his composure.  “I don’t know.  I’ll figure it out when we get there.  Please, just bandage what I can’t reach and let’s go.”  He held out his arm and I went back to the med kit.  

*      *      *

Jack stitched up my arm and tended to my back while I checked the cut on my stomach.  

He paused while I bandaged that and I felt him watching me.  “You’re okay?  I mean…”

I got what he meant.  I craned my neck to look at him, grimacing a little as my back moved.  “Jack, I’ll be fine.  We’re alive.  We’re together.  Right now, that’s enough for me.”

He couldn’t resist the urge to hug me, but at least he avoided my back.  “I love you.”

I hesitated.  I mean, as absurd as it might be, I didn’t often say that and right now I was a little emotionally burnt-out, but….  “I love you, too.”

*      *     *

I watched Cassidy leave while I sat in the car.  As much as I had grown used to waiting, I was not in a mood for patience.  I would have preferred to wait in the airport, where we would be more certain to make our flights and I would have walked as much as I needed to for the time being.  It didn’t help that I was hungry and my leg maintained a level of pain just above what I was used to tolerating.  I was also not comfortable waiting in a car where I might be recognized if a cop happened to drive by.  I had claimed the front passenger seat by virtue of being the first to the car and paying for the plane tickets.  Jack and Arcade could be as affectionate as they wanted once I was gone.  I _was_ happy for them, mostly for Jack, but the less I needed to see, the better.  What I’d seen in the past few months had never really bothered me at the time.  I’d considered it a dalliance and nothing more, but now I cared that Jack was happy and he had chosen Arcade, which gave the actions more meaning.  Only now, did I wish I could easily forget what I’d seen.  But they were happy.  I would get over Jack eventually.  

What the hell was taking them so long?

I’d almost dragged myself out of the car and gone to check on them when Jack and Arcade finally emerged.  In a kilt and t-shirt, Jack struck an awkward balance between formal and casual and it suited him as much as Arcade’s tan slacks and grey shirt looked exactly like something he’d normally wear.  All together we looked like two businessmen and an art intern, and hopefully that was the impression we’d give.

Aside from the dog.  Jack carried Turing under one arm and he had papers and a special canine vest in his backpack.  The terrier would draw attention we didn’t need, but it would also make us less suspicious.  People fleeing the country didn’t usually bring pets onto planes.  And I’d grown to like Jack’s dogs.  

Jack wore his backpack and carried the vested dog and documents while I had my few possessions in a briefcase Alerio had given me and Arcade had nothing but the clothes and bandages on his back.  All the way there we got strange looks, either for the dog or for the lack of luggage.  It was midnight when we arrived at the gate and our flight left in an hour.  

*      *      *

With the right papers, I had no problem taking Turing on board, however many strange looks we got for having him.  We were flying coach, because that was what Vulpes had booked last minute, but he’d gotten us seats next to each other, so we took up one section of the row we were in without having to deal with anyone but each other bumping into our many injuries.  With the dog, I had the middle seat.  

With Turing, and looking as we did, we drew a lot of attention and even on the red eye more than a dozen people stopped to talk to us.  A few asked if we were okay, which we said we were because we didn’t want to talk about it.  Some asked what had happened, and Arcade usually took the opportunity to deflect that question.  Most asked if they could pet my dog.  Considering at least two of us didn’t speak any Spanish, and on a flight to Mexico, some of the people who spoke to us didn’t speak English, several of these conversations became a long and amusing endeavor to convey what we meant through Latin, French, or Mandarin.  Vulpes, in the window seat, either let us struggle or didn’t speak Spanish either.  He seemed a bit lost in thought and I asked him about it after we took off.  

“It’s just a little disorienting,” he explained in German, “for the most part, the Legion is gone, and I am no longer a member.  I’ve been with the Legion since I was eleven.”

My German was still a bit rusty, so after having to explain a few words again, we switched to Mandarin.  The elderly woman in the seat across the aisle from us looked over curiously, and made eye contact with Arcade, who shrugged.  

I frowned at Vulpes.  “You’ve been in the Legion since a year after I first met you?”

He nodded.  “I will find something else to do, of course, something better.  It’s just… I have known nothing else since I was a child.  Aside from my cover as a news agent.  Perhaps I can apply to write for another newspaper…”

I smiled at him.  “You _are_ a good writer.  I’m sure you’d do well.”

He chuckled.  “Coming from you, I believe that.”

We lapsed into silence as much as possible after that, glad for the fasten seatbelts light to limit passersby asking questions.  Arcade and I both slept off and on while Vulpes stared out the window, pondering his future.  He’d be fine, I knew that much.  Whether he became a journalist, or a spy, or found some new career, maybe even as a painter, he was going to be successful.  After all, this was Vulpes Inculta.  Once he got over the loss of the Legion, I knew he’d be a better, and happier man.  

The layover in Mexico City was long enough for a breakfast, or dinner, or lunch at a restaurant in the airport.  It was one of those airport cafes with TVs on the walls showing the news in at least three languages.  The cafe didn’t allow dogs, so Vulpes got coffee and a bagel first and then kept an eye on Turing, who, in turn watched him eat and licked his nose hopefully.  Vulpes had avoided walking, and he couldn’t take his crutches with him, so, refusing a wheelchair, he hobbled from place to place and got more concerned stares here than he had in California.  Sitting down, he soon went unnoticed, despite the dog.  Arcade and I, on the other hand, stood out as soon as we stood up, me with my bandaged, broken nose and swollen shoulder and him with the few bruises visible on his hands and face and the generally stiff way he moved to avoid hurting his back.  The barista gave us a long and curious stare but didn’t say anything as we ordered.  

Six groggy business men drank their coffee at the tables in the cafe, watching a report on the “Courthouse Massacre” as it was being called.  Arcade got bottled water and an apple, but we had to wait a bit for the banana mango smoothie I’d ordered along with my cinnamon roll.  We ate and watched the news report while the smoothie was made.  

“The San Francisco courthouse,” the reporter explained, “appears to have been taken over by an international terrorist organization known as the Legion.”  The camera cut to an aerial video of the wreckage, focusing on the bodies covering the stairs and the empty cop cars in the street.  “Early reports estimate the death toll in the high two hundreds.  Luckily, many of the courthouse staff were on vacation for the holiday weekend, but all staff within the building are confirmed dead.  Police arrived, but were quickly overwhelmed.  Captain Ronald Curtis,” the reporter went on, “received an anonymous tip about the attack and had called the National Guard shortly before the shooting began.  They arrived and successfully secured the building, although many claim that the massacre had already ended by then.  Eye witness accounts suggest that concerned citizens armed themselves and assisted the police, driving the Legion off before they could take more casualties.  Some witnesses claim that the good samaritans may have had assistance from ex-Legion terrorists,” the video cut back to the reporter and showed sketches as names were listed, “the prime suspect in the governor’s assassination,” cue the sketch of Cato, “and the Legion’s second in command, Vulpes Inculta.”  I snorted into my pastry at the sketch they showed.  With black ski goggles hiding most of his face, the man they showed could have been Vulpes, or it might have been any number of particularly hot celebrities.  The artist had given him slightly longer hair than he had in an absolutely dreamy style and it came off looking more like the kind of men pictured on the covers of my books than Vulpes himself, although he could certainly pull off that sort of steamy allure.  

Arcade leaned close to whisper to me.  “I don’t think there’s any risk of people recognizing him.”

I laughed.  “I think he needs to be more worried about any gay man or straight woman who sees that sketch.”

The barista, who hadn’t been watching, looked at the TV and blushed.  Whether or not she somehow realized why we were talking about it, I’m pretty sure that if she had recognized Vulpes, she wouldn’t be interested in turning him in to the cops.  She put my smoothie on the counter and I took it and left.  A TV near our gate had the same channel and we found Vulpes watching in silence while Turing stared at the half-eaten bagel he seemed to have forgotten he was holding.  We sat down beside him and he noticed us.  

“Farewell.”  

His good-bye came out of nowhere as he stood.  Arcade and I both stared at him.  “That’s it?  Where are you going?”

*      *      *

“Like I said,” Vulpes grinned, holding his bagel in one hand and his briefcase under his arm.  He’d finished his coffee already.  “I’m finishing what we started.  I may stop by Scotland when I’m done, just to see how you’ve settled in.”

I grinned.  The guy was alright, however much the Legion had skewed his morals.  Deep down, I guess he really was a decent person.  “Take care of yourself.”  

Vulpes gave me one of his rare smiles.  “You too, Arcade.”

Jack looked content.  “Good luck.”

“I don’t need luck,” Vulpes glanced back, “but it does help.  I’ll let you know if I end up writing.”  

He walked off, quickly vanishing into the crowd further into the terminal.  As busy as some airports could be, things seemed relatively quiet here today.  I looked at the TV, wondering if the holiday weekend really was the holiday I’d thought it might be.  The new program had the date in the corner of the screen.  Jack, having scarfed down his donut quicker than I’d eaten my apple, followed my gaze.  

“Oh look at that, it’s Christmas.”

I snorted.  In the warm airport, with shops selling tourist-y sombreros and maracas?  “Mexico doesn’t really feel like Christmas.”

Jack wrapped his hand around mine.  “Let’s make it feel like Christmas.”  He kissed me.  

Obviously, in an airport, we didn’t do anything serious, just the kiss, and he snuggled against me as much as he could without hurting my back or arm.  

The news ended and the channel stopped being depressing as it switched to a special showing of It’s a Wonderful Life.  

Jack dug something out of his pocket.  

“Hey, Arcade…”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is the title of a song in the musical Aida (the new one.) A little afraid that it's a bit of a spoiler, but it was too perfect for me to pass up (and I love the song.)   
> After this, there's just the epilogue and a lot of things will be mentioned or explained in there, but if there's anything in particular that you're wondering about, please tell me. I won't be writing the epilogue for a few days, I have it outlined but I'm going to be busy until Monday. I want to clear up any questions you might have, if possible.


	54. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The epilogue.

“That’s not how _I_ remember it.”

Jack stopped writing to lean back in his seat and grin at me, a playful twinkle in his stunning eyes.  “Oh?  Isn’t it?”  He’d grown out his hair in the last five years and it was back to the gorgeous wavy ponytail he’d had when we’d met.  His nose had healed almost perfectly and so had my arm.  My back had been too shredded to heal completely, but it wasn’t that bad anymore.  We had our physical scars, but most of our mental scars had healed.  Jack had a BMW, not Garrett’s, but the same model, sort of in honor of him, I suppose.  Sometimes he was still bothered by his memories, but he’d learned to drive and he did so sometimes, just around the island.  He wasn’t completely over his phobia, but he’d improved dramatically.  After five years, he’d decided to write a book about everything that had happened back then, modifying it, of course, so it seemed enough like fiction that we wouldn’t get arrested.  

I smiled and answered him, “As I recall, you couldn’t fit your hand into your pocket around the arm rest, so you had to stand up and try to fish the ring out.  And I asked what you were doing, you got nervous, and it took you over a minute to actually get the words out.”

“And then you said no,” he teased.  

“Well, you can hardly blame me,” I chuckled, “after everything that happened that week, I think getting engaged on top of it all would have been too much.”

He laughed again, “Paris was less chaotic?”

“There’s a big difference between stopping a hijacking and taking down a global terrorist organization.”  I added on a more serious note, “And I can’t say I was in the best state of mind at that time, getting engaged on top of everything… well I might have had a bit of a breakdown at that point.”

He got up to hug me and I gave him a pointed stare.  “Jack, it was years ago.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t still regret the part I played in causing all that.”

He did hug me and just continued to cling to me, standing in the office that used to be a bedroom back when his mother had owned the castle and island.  I didn’t need to work, with Jack’s wealth, but the remote island also made it difficult for people out here to get medical attention in emergencies so the locals and those living on islands even further out to sea appreciated having a doctor around.  Jack was still the same ridiculously successful erotic writer though he’d written a few more books in less adult genres of late.  I’d forgiven him.  I still didn’t like to consider how very questionable his morality had been back then, even if he seemed to have changed now.  I wanted to change the subject.  I smiled down at Jack and he looked up at me.  “I still find it absurd that our flight just happened to get hijacked.”

He laughed again.  “Well, you know my luck.”

“I’ve been living with your luck for years, Jack, it’s still incredible.”

He smirked slyly.  “Only my luck?”

“Well, among other things.”

We kissed.  After he’d proposed the first time, I’d actually expected him to just keep asking, trying to charm me until I’d say yes.  I was both glad and impressed that he’d backed off and just been happy to travel around with me and deal with the logistics of moving to a different country, the uncertainty I had about making that kind of commitment, and the emotional crisis I’d still been going through at the time.  He hadn’t even mentioned marriage again until I’d finally gotten around to my own proposal two years ago.  In Paris, as it happened, although I hadn’t really planned the location.  

Jack and I didn’t get beyond kissing right then, but we still flinched when the door suddenly swung open.  Vulpes stalked into the room with every ounce of confidence he’d had five years ago and would probably always retain, despite the slight limp still evident in his gait.  He’d moved to Venice and lived there now, writing crime and suspense novels as successful as Jack’s erotica and no doubt based heavily on personal experience.  He didn’t stop by as often, luckily, but he dropped by unannounced every few months, as he did now, and we still had no idea how exactly he got into the castle.  He usually stayed for a few days and this was his second day here this time, so at least we’d already known he was in the castle.  

“Jack,” the ever-elegant ex-frumentarius began, “Mila’s been accepted into Oxford.”

Jack looked as baffled as I did for a moment.  “She already found out?”

Vulpes chuckled— an honest laugh and not his more common controlled laugh, he’d only started laughing normally around me a few months ago.  “No, but I have my sources.  It has only been decided three hours ago, the acceptance letter is not yet on the way.”

I sighed but at this point, nothing he could do could really surprise me.  “Is there anything you don’t know?”

Vulpes smirked a bit unnervingly and then frowned.  “I will never get over your Scottish accent.”

“I’ve been living here for years, what do you expect?”  My mock defensive tone faded to something more uncertain, “Is it really that bad?”

Jack hugged me again, nearly knocking me over.  “It’s wonderful.”

Vulpes dropped the subject and turned to Jack.  “I must say, I am glad our sister didn’t go into demolitions, or terrorism, or erotic writing and chose instead to pursue a medical career.  At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mila has her doctorate by the age of twenty.”

“Jeez,” Jack chuckled, “I’d have never thought my sister could make me feel like an under achiever.”

We spent a few moments discussing Mila and her future, but the girl seemed guaranteed success.  Nearly a woman now, Mila had inherited every bit of Vulpes’ confidence and charisma, along with her mother’s ambition and Jack’s luck and an ability to charm anyone she wanted to charm.  She was brilliant, and she would make an excellent doctor, though I had to fear for anyone who might be misled by her youth and beauty.  Mila had a combination of cunning and determination that made her as dangerous as Vulpes when wronged.  

As suddenly as he had arrived yesterday, Vulpes told us that he planned to return to Venice and had already called Daisy to fly him to the mainland.  She’d moved here as well, as had all the Remnants.  My father’s old unit had taken to Scotland as well as Johnson and Moreno had taken to Scottish whiskey.  They lived nearby, Doc Henry in the highlands, in a new facility for his research, and everyone else in the port town where the ferry docked.  I had my father on the mantle downstairs, opposite a picture of Jack’s mother.  The whole mantle had sort of become a memorial and I liked to think that, all in all, they’d approve of us now.  

Jack and I stood on the porch to watch the helicopter take off and fly back over the sea.  Even as late in the evening as it was, the sun hadn’t started to set and the sky was bright and clear over the water.  The rotors started up and we watched the copter until it became a silver speck over the distant line of the far shore.  

Jack leaned against my shoulder and wrapped his arm around my own until our hands met and fingers intertwined.  I knew he wanted to suggest something big even before he spoke.  

“You know, it would be nice to raise a kid of our own.  I mean more than just being the legal guardians of my ridiculously precocious sister.”

I frowned at him.  “That might not be the best idea, given how dangerous our lives tend to be.”

“Life is always dangerous,” Jack pointed out, “even if ours is more dangerous than normal.”  

As always, he had a point.  

I thought about it for a while before I finally spoke.  “Alright.”  Time for the next big adventure. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. This was a blast to write, but also the most gruelingly long thing I've ever written. I loved it, and I'm going to miss writing Jack and Arcade and Vulpes adventuring through California and the world, but it's finally finished, and that's also a huge relief. After this I'll be working on Piebald and The Dogs of Peace, probably focusing on the latter for the time being. I really want to do another modern setting story and I hope to do one in the future, but Piebald, at least, is not going that way. The Dogs of Peace may get more complicated in terms of setting, but I haven't decided.


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